![]() ![]() Assuming you’ve been over there for a while, how did you get over there? I’ve heard it’s hard for foreigners to get work in Japan outside of teaching English. I’m pretty sure I’ll have to live in Japan for at least a year or two before I can become fluent enough for most translation, and I was really hoping to find some type of scholarship to get me over there. So I guess I just want to ask, how did you become a translator? Is there a general path you have to take? You’d be better off having a degree in another, most stable field, and then doing translating if you get the chance. Based on what I know, that’s because translators don’t need a specific degree, it just has to be a four-year degree. I’ve heard that majoring in Japanese, or any language for that matter, is generally a bad idea. The problem is, I don’t really know how to become one. Well, I’m really into Japanese, and I really do want to be a translator because I think it’s one of the most fun tings to do. Hello! I don’t know if you remember the last time I sent an email, but I just asked what being a translator was like. The next e-mail I got actually fits nicely in with the first e-mail: If you can ignore that thought, you’ll master the language – and translation – in no time! So don’t let the thought of “man, this is so hard, I can’t do it” get to you. That’s the quick version – there’s a little more info in the old Gamasutra interview I did.īasically, just try to follow the stuff in the page I linked to above and you should be on your way! The language isn’t that hard to learn, it just takes a lot of time. Later on, after I’d been in college for a few years, I started studying the language again, then spent a year in Japan soaking in the language, then came back and finished my degree. I then taught myself for a little while, then eventually I started studying it at the not-so-local university during my high school summer breaks. Even though it was meant for second year students of Japanese, I had a lot of fun trying to decipher the writing. I randomly found a Japanese language textbook in the not-so-local library. I really do need to get around to writing Part 2 someday, though…Īs for me, I pretty much started studying when I was around 16 or so. The Road to Becoming a Professional Japanese->English Translator, Part 1Įven if you don’t care about the Japanese language, you might want to give it a read anyway I’ve gotten comments from people who said they found it inspirational anyway.I’ve actually gotten this question a lot over the years, enough that I did actually write something up! It’s only the first part, but if you genuinely want to learn and get good at Japanese, check it out: ![]() My dream job is to work at ATLUS, but we all know that will never happen…. I wanted to become a Japanese translator and video game designer when I’m older (currently learning the Ruby language), and I was wondering, how did you learn Japanese? Did you learn when you were very young, did you train yourself or did you have a tutor, things like that. To kick things off, here are two e-mails I received just today! At the very least I hope it’ll help push people toward localization-related careers. So although it strays a little bit from the topic of game localization, hopefully it’ll still be useful and insightful for a lot of readers. …Except I’ve never actually gotten around to it after all these years, so instead I think I’ll post little mini-articles and Q&As about it from time to time. I regularly get questions about how to get into studying Japanese or how to get into the Japanese->English translation field, and I always tell myself, “Man, I really need to write up a big article on the subject someday!” ![]()
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