Translator

How to Become a Translator

from wikiHow - The How to Manual That You Can Edit
Becoming a translator takes practice, skill, and patience with yourself.

Steps

1. Learn the language! If you can't already speak the language fluently, learn it. To get an idea of how fluent you want to be in this language, you want to stumble across a new word in the language not much more often than you do in your native tongue. Also remember that to be really successful, one foreign language is definitely not enough.
2. Get an education. Get a degree in translation studies or intercultural communication and then pass all the exams you think you might need, depending on where you want to work, for instance the EPSO exams if you want to work for the EU.
3. Gain some practice and experience. Most (or virtually all) universities will include a compulsory internship in the study programme. If yours does not, try another way. Intern with an organization or a translation office, even try asking some of your teachers who are also translators, they might be willing to let you work for them during your studies.
4. Set your goals. Decide what you want to do. Do you want to do literary translations of books? Translate for a large organization? Have your own business? Make a choice.
5. Once you are done with your studies, get your foot in the door. This depends on what kind of translator you want to be. If you want to translate books, apply with a publishing house. If you want to work for an organization, find one and apply with them, it is also a great idea to have an internship with that organization before you graduate, you might leave a good impression and be hired. If you want to start your own business, well, look for clients.
6. Be effective and professional. Be fast, charge a reasonable sum for your services and create translations of high quality. Also, be professional and do not accept jobs you are not qualified for and do not take too many jobs at the same time. You do not want to be remembered for not keeping deadlines.

Tips

• Speak the language as much as you can.
• For practice, translate some Wikipedia pages.
• There are many foreign channels for Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Italian, etc on TV. Try and find them and translate the show as it goes. For even better practice, write down a few lines.
• Translate wikiHow articles into other languages. This helps everyone, you and wikiHow readers.

Warnings

• The translation field needs fast, reliable people.

Related wikiHows

• How to Become an Advanced English Speaker
• How to Be an Effective Learner
• How to Be Self Learning
• How to Translate a wikiHow Article

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