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links for all pages from the career handbook * * * Spanish Translator Education Undergraduation in Spanish Focus in Translation American translators Spanish Translations * * * Links for translation services |
The Spanish Translation Career Handbook The Spanish Translator Education The Spanish translator needs a formal and college-grade education. Anything less than that will not give you the language skills necessary to professionally produce a translation. Many translators will pursue a language college degree. Others will start their studies in a specific knowledge field such as engineering, marketing or medicine without thinking about translations. Later on, they will discover the pleasure of translating and will then pursue the skills to convert their trades in a translation living. After a period of time that will vary from one year to three years, you will have a few clients that will be able to generate a considerable income for you. It is when you will feel like a "professional translator" able to make a live from this work. There are two different education paths a translator will follow, and we will discuss a little about each one of them along advantages and disadvantages: Scenario A. Someone will have a college education in a major like engineering, science, medicine, etc. and many years later this person will start to do translation. Scenario B. Someone will have a college education focusing language / translation and will start to do translation right after studies.
This is a sample education path
for someone in scenario A: A similar scenario for someone studying engineering would have a much higher initial investment, and also a higher return at the 6th and following years.
This is a sample education path
for someone in scenario B:
These
are some known advantages and disadvantages of each education
scenario: Choice of Language Most of the translators will work with a language strictly related to their own heritage. People with Hispanic origin will work with Spanish translations, Brazilians will work with Portuguese translation, and Russians will do Russian translation. A singular group is the group of American translators with no heritage languages other than the English. They will study a foreign language for passion and will become excellent translators from the foreign language to English. This is something always true: it will be times easier to translate from another language to your mother language to the opposite. In fact, most translation agencies will require the translator to work only on jobs meeting this condition. This means that for the particular group of Americans learning a second language there will always be a huge field of work. For this particular group of people choosing what language to learn, it may be worthy to research the compensation and demand per language. Each language has a specific offer/demand and a related compensation. Market price of a language Chinese, for example, is a difficult language to be learnt by people from the western. For us it is an exotic language and most people would expect a high compensation for translation involving Chinese. The truth is that Chinese is one of the most affordable translations in the more than 400 existing languages. The reason is the following: imagine how many translators you will find among 1 billion human beings. Although there is a high demand from companies all around the world going after the Chinese markets, there is a huge number of professional translators working in this pair. Another counter-intuitive case is German. German is an old language, included in the western civilization, and no novelty at all. Nonetheless, it's translation cost is almost double the cost for a comparable translation related to Chinese. The reason is that the German born population is small and it is growing at smaller and smaller rates. Someone that speaks German natively and understands Financial terms in an expert level will probably making a huge money working as an executive in the Banking industry. To find someone with this level and doing translation works will cost you a high, high price. |
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