How to Live As a Professional Translator
Translation does not only require you to know foreign languages but to also have a lot of creativity and knowledge of both your native language and the foreign language. A professional translator should know all the business aspects and how to express them in both languages formally and informally. In fact, you should be involved in the language fully by incorporating it in your daily life so the translation comes with a natural flow.
In-house Working Advantages:
1. You can check widgets, manipulate, or take them apart.
2. You are aware of the target audience such as company nonprofessional, stockholder, technicians, or sales representatives and can customize the translation accordingly.
3. You can check the background of the letters translated previously, and know the purpose of accomplishing. Such information cannot be retrieved from an agency.
Being a professional translator
Advantages of Working with a translation agency:
1. You will enhance your knowledge of different subjects at a variety of levels of translation.
2. In agency, you can easily turn down any offer for translation if you are busy whereas an In-house employer is your boss and will not allow you to do so. However, you must make the decision quickly to turn down so they have sufficient time to replace you.
Disadvantages of working with an Agency:
1. There is no fixed salary coming every month to your account. So if you are single, then it is not an issue, but being married it is very difficult to manage as a freelancer.
2. In in-house you can have weekends off but in freelancing as a professional translator you have to be ready all the time as there is no set schedule for work and no holidays.
Being fluent in a foreign language is not enough; you need to have extensive knowledge of various technical fields in order to be a professional translator. There are various fields of specialty such as chemistry, telecommunications, or finance but you must develop technical expertise in at least one of these domains. One way to develop your expertise is to work with notorious professional translation services as an in-house translator and polish your skills in a particular field.
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