What does it take to be an English translator?

There is no threshold in the translation industry, and it is easy to do, even at the public level.

However, professional translation has a hard threshold and requires professional background, knowledge, vocabulary and grammar.

Professional translation, a better position, generally requires a master's degree in translation +CATTI 2 translation certificate+translation experience of more than one million words, or a bachelor's degree or above+CET-5 (non-English major)+translation experience of more than three million words+work experience in a translation company, or equivalent ability, which cannot meet such conditions/abilities. Translation alone is not easy to do.

Familiar with the background knowledge and terminology of IT, finance, law, machinery, chemical industry, literature and other specific industries, familiar with the use of professional tools such as trados, memo-Q, X-Bench and Passolo, skilled in the creation, import, export, merger and optimization of TM, and providing high-quality Chinese-English translation with the help of professional tools; If you are familiar with professional typesetting, you can provide one-stop service, the price can be higher, and with excellent translation level, the unit price can even be quoted at 350-500. Some high-end customers have high expectations for quality, but they are not stingy with cost; Individual top translators in the industry can charge up to 2000 yuan/thousand words, and the unit price of teachers in Beiwai Zhou can reach 2500 yuan/thousand words.

-I'm Cha Hongyu, a freelance English translator. I have been engaged in translation for more than 6 years and have about 5 million words of Chinese-English translation experience. He has worked for Akami (a network security giant), OSRAM, State Grid, China Railway 18 Bureau, Huawei, China University of Science and Technology, Macau University of Science and Technology, Nanjing Second People's Hospital, Brother, LittleFuse, Lefenhausen, Mitsubishi and Sony.

The current unit price of direct customers is 240,000 words in 350 yuan. According to the difficulty, delivery date and other factors, the unit price of the manuscript produced by the translation company is 150-220 (after the translation company changed hands, the client price doubled to 300-500 yuan/thousand words). After all, customer development costs, translation costs, proofreading costs, typesetting costs, tax costs, office costs, company rent and so on.

A translator with my level and experience earns about 12000- 15000 a month (I am a freelance translator in Ji 'an, Jiangxi); Professional translation is hard, and only three or four thousand words of the original text can be translated every day. Experienced, long working hours, translation income is only 600 yuan a day-800 yuan. If I work overtime (working hours 10- 12 hours), I can reach 1000- 1200 yuan. This kind of income is not a big problem to support the family in a small place. Compared with the financial, IT, legal, medical and other industries, this income is a bit low, so you need to love this industry very much, work hard and have feelings for this industry in order to stick to it! ! Therefore, I suggest you think it over before you enter the business. The treatment is for reference only. I studied computer in normal universities as an undergraduate, worked as a computer teacher in middle schools for three years, and worked as a full-time or part-time translator in Guangzhou Huiquan, Guangzhou Tianjie, Guangzhou FLE, CTIS, Jinghua Times Dayu, Zhengzhou Creative Translation and other companies under the State Administration of Foreign Languages.

The development of translation is more and more detailed. The working mode of translation in the future will be machine translation+manual review/editing after machine translation. After 6-8 years, a large number of translators will be eliminated, especially at the primary and intermediate levels (including my average level of course). With the maturity and progress of technology, the proportion of machine translation can even reach 80% or even higher. This is not an alarmist. Therefore, only by improving our own level can we survive in the fierce competition. In my opinion, the emergence of artificial intelligence translation is not necessarily a bad thing, at least it will improve the overall level of the industry and force our employees to improve their professionalism. Let's speed up the translation process through better technology, provide customers with higher quality communication and reduce the translation cost per word/time.

I wish you all a happy New Year and go further and further on your favorite translation road.