Renan Dias wrote:
Rachel Waddington wrote:
As well as excellent comprehension skills in English you will also need top notch writing skills in your native language - plus attention to detail, research skills, and the ability to market yourself and network. You'll need some kind of online presence (start by filling in your profile).
Electrical engineering is a useful specialism as translators tend to come from arts backgrounds and even those who take technical translations can be daunted by electrical engineering texts. Technical translation has been hit hard by machine translation and AI though - you will probably find yourself post-editing rather than translating. Rates for this can be shockingly low.
Even established translators with decades of experience are going through tough times at the moment. Translation may not be the best way to make a living, given your technical background.
Damn, that's a tough pill to swallow, not only your advice but this thread as a whole, I wasn't expecting to be easy but my research on other places and this thread painted the picture that I'm entering in a building where a fire just started and as I'm seeing from all the advice and the discussion about getting a degree in translation I'm seeing entering that market will take a lot more dedication than I initially thought as I was seeing it as something I could do as a side job until I got a client base big enough to stop my current job(as a seller actually because it pays so much more than being an electrician here) and become a translator full time while managing college, and on top of that there is a great chance that it's not going to be worth all that trouble but I guess trying doesn't cost me anything, and at the end of the day is a bit more knowledge than I had before. Thanks for the advice, I appreciate it.
Yes, you could see it as: 'entering in a building where a fire just started ...', it's not that much off the mark.
Although to me it looks more like: 'getting on a drifting boat where half of the crew is working hard at sinking the boat'.
Nowadays I would think trice before recommending to anyone to start as translator - unless you can get into some very specialised niche, i.e. you have some really strong Unique Selling Point, it's simply not worth it - the way it's going 'plain average' will do you no good in translating.
[Edited at 2025-02-18 14:13 GMT]
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