It is the norm for a human to work to be able to make a living. Work is an essential ingredient for a happy life, and now research proves that working hard in a field that you love will give your life meaning and purpose. Productive work keeps you active; it challenges you to continue learning and to strive towards mastery.
Some people would say that “work is a part of life,” so everyone must work. Working gets you to move and it is vital for people’s health and wellbeing.
According to science, the person who is actively working (not referring to a workaholic) tends to live longer and healthier than people who are not. People gain knowledge, experiences, self-esteem, and self-confidence and become mature from their work. There are endless benefits to say about work.
Getting the first job in the field that you desired is exciting, isn’t it?
Are you the young people who are just graduated with no experience and wish to pursue a career in translation and localization? If so, this article may help you to attain your dream job.
There are only four simple attributes that would acquire from you to move on to this position:
1. Education:
You must be educated to at least Bachelor's level ideally in one or more languages or demonstrate equivalent experience in languages.
Now, some of you may be wondering, how about if I just freshly graduated from high school but my English is great and I am pretty good at Literature in my native language. Can I become a translator?
The answer is yes, you can as long as you are doing good enough at both languages, the source, and target languages.
You may consider taking some short courses or attending free or paid webinars offered by various organizations and companies such as ProZ, ATA , and Trados – just to name a few.
After you have all the above mentioned, you can step up to the job, however, you may find that most of your applications would be unresponsive, so what should you do?
Don’t be frightened yet. You still can be fully working in this field, but as mentioned earlier, it needs some time, and this scenario leads to the second attribute which is “Experience”.
2. Experience:
Well, as a young person who has just graduated, you have no experience, so what should you do?
That would be very hard for most good companies or organizations to consider your application with blank experience, even though you are holding a Master's degree. This is because works always required experience, nevertheless, experience is always gained from work.
Here are some of our suggestions for you to gain your experience;
Volunteering to contribute to the communities; There are many NGOs and organizations that need many volunteers to help them with the translation. You can search online to find the best one that you want to work for. From our side we would advocate the top and well-esteemed as follows:
1/ Translation without Border is a non-profit organization set up to provide translation services for humanitarian non-profits. There are over 60,000 languages available for volunteers from different nations. By volunteering to perform the task for them it means you are also a part of social work to help other people.
2/ Wikipedia is free content, the multilingual online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers through a model of open collaboration, using a wiki-based editing system.
3/ UN Volunteers. Everyone knows the UN, by volunteering with the UN you can help millions of people around the globe.
4/ Tedtalks is one of the nonprofit organizations which focus on spreading ideas to the world. It is an outstanding place to start your first job by participating in the amazing horde.
Contact directly to translation agency to offer your first service without or with minimum fee: Well, this is a very efficient and faster way to try, because you can gain experience and at the same time get some little pay, and if you do perform the job well and the agency likes and feel trusts in you, this is the time that you can shift your profession forward. There are 45,381 registered companies on Proz, therefore, feel free to select the upper one you would rather have and the one that is available in your language pair.
3. Technical skills:
Technologies these days are enormous. For that reason, you have to make alterations to this new stage. Most translation projects are required to use a particular CAT tool, a software application that supports the translation of text from one language to another and can help translators to translate faster and improve translation quality and consistency.
There are some CAT Tools that you should be familiar with. Some great free online tools are Across, OmegaT, Wordfast Anywhere, MateCat, SmartCAT, Pootle, and some need a license or login credentials to use them either online or offline such as SDL Trados, Memsource, MemoQ, XTM, etc.
Having a good comprehension of Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and other computer programs is a must. If you are not an expert yet in these computer skills, try to improve more by taking some short online training courses or attending a course in a private training center in your area.
4. Soft skills:
One of the most important skills that are required in every job's performance.
Soft skills can be varied as well depending on which role or position you are in, however, overall, it implies something like interpersonal, leadership, teamwork, communication, problem-solving, adaptability skills…
In this article, we wanted to share with you precisely the soft skills that are necessary for a translator as follows:
- Trustworthy. Since this kind of job is a remote appointment, therefore your integrity and commitment will allow you to work independently without someone overseeing you which help you to speed up your performance and productivity.
- Communication. Your competence to understand well what people are trying to tell you and can respond appropriately is the key to good communication. Most of the time, you will need to liaise with people nonverbally, like using email, social media, and text messages, yet these can lead to confusion sometimes if you are not meticulous.
- Time management. This is quite challenging for some people to manage their time well. Being able to prioritize and meet the time limit is crucial for this piece of work because all tasks would come up with specific deadlines, if you are punctual, you will gain more trust from your project managers and have a high chance to receive more job assignments from them.
- Flexibility. To work effectively in the translation industry, you need to be well prepared to adapt some differentiation and changes such as timestamps, people behavior, workflows, and requests. You are most likely to work with companies that are based overseas and around the universe that require you to be flexible in timing and understanding your clients’ requisition.
- Creativity. Creativity here means the capability of converting the meaning of your translation sentences or words to the extent that gets people to fully understand when they are reading. This is critical, you may have an excellent knowledge of the language pair that you are working on, but being able to make your perception is essential to produce a great document translation so that people can feel this context is from a human, not a machine.
- Attention to detail. Attention to detail is obligatory for translators, as this position needs people who are capable of spot-checking and observing mistakes. A conscious person is doubtlessly good at organizing and analyzing which helps them to minimize inaccuracy and produce a great translation result.
We hope that these four attributes mentioned could help you in finding employment in linguistics.
Last but not least, please bear in mind that, if you couldn’t start your first job instantly as a translator try to work on some jobs that are connected with linguistics.
For instance, transcription and proofreading or editing in your native language is an exceptional option.
If you have any ideas, please feel free to drop them in the comment box below to spread your expertise to other people. Sharing is caring!
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