What does a Chinese-English translator need to succeed? This is a question I get asked all the time, and the answer is a resounding, “Not what you’d expect.” What makes a translator successful is largely opposite to the largely counterproductive knowledge taught by schools, where translation students are indoctrinated into an extreme short-term mindset while ignoring subjects for which market demand is strong. A successful translator is one who is self-motivated and self-reliant. In particular, prospective translators need to pursue career-relevant factors. They need to think about what kind of industry they want to focus on and engage in career planning to determine how they will achieve specific goals. Since the skills for effective translation performance take decades to develop, a behavioral trait commonly known as “grit” is needed to ensure that a person continues to develop their skills and pursue their goals over the long term.
Schools Focus on Proficiency on Entry
Most translation schools teaching Chinese to English translation primarily consider applicants’ existing skills proficiency on application, which is an overall poor predictor of career success. The chief skill tested is usually the applicant’s second language skill which, in most cases, is going to be English. Several other skills like critical thinking, essay-writing, and even current translation ability are also tested. Students may face a three or four-hour-long exam involving writing essays in English and oral interviews in which they are questioned on why they chose to translate things in a certain way. Bear in mind that none of these students will typically have been trained as translators before applying for a graduate-level translation program, and they might not even be aware that they are going to be tested in this manner.
Once those accepted begin their studies, a rapid metamorphosis typically occurs during the first few weeks of the program. Initially, arriving students are eager to pursue a career in translation and reach for the stars within the industry. However, about 90% wind up abandoning those dreams within the first month. Traditionally, most of these students changed their career goal to be English teachers, but various “assistant” type career paths — executive assistant, marketing assistant, administrative assistant, human resources assistant, legal assistant, and so on — are becoming increasingly common after the roll-back of English teaching programs in primary schools. While Master of Laws (LLM) program students in an adjacent building are all heading to become litigators and corporate lawyers, the Master of Translation program students next door will be on track to be their secretaries.
Most would-be translation students who indicated why they have made the career decisions they have indicated that they were not aware that the job would involve staring at a computer screen for so many hours. This is actually a fairly bizarre thing to say because if you have ever done any sort of work that revolves around word processing, you should know that it takes place primarily on a computer. But most people embarking on a career in translation, committing to several years of school training to be translators, haven’t thought that far. The fault can really be laid on school systems and not the graduates. Colleges indoctrinate students into an obsession with short-term goals by making all evaluations revolve around a 16-week semester cycle. The students are taught to think no further than 16 weeks into the future, and as a result wind up embarking on careers without actually thinking about what their future entails.
The motivation to consider translation as a career seems like it could be summed up in “What am I going to do with a B.A. in English?” Moreover, institutions also assess whether a particular candidate is well-suited for a career in translation based on whether they were a good English B.A. student, and not on whether they will be a good translator in the future. As a result, very few translation program graduates become successful translators—anecdotally, the ratio is around 2-3%. Most organizations hiring them have graduates doing administrative assistant work, keeping them away from real translations. So, what does it take for a translator to succeed?
Industry Focus is Essential
Would-be translators generally come from an English major background, whereas the translation profession generally needs the opposite. A foreign language major, and particularly these English majors, are often just programs teaching memorization and practice exercises of commonly used words. More sophisticated programs include modules covering literature very heavily, in addition to current events in newspapers. While literary publishers and newspapers do translate quite a lot of material, the pay rates for these fields are also extremely low. The reality is that, unless someone is incredibly enthusiastic about literature and independently wealthy, they are unlikely to work in literature. TransEditing is another beast entirely, with relatively few open positions and also relatively low salaries. Interpreting is also incredibly underpaid; New York’s court interpreters filed a discrimination lawsuit because transcriptionists earn more than interpreters, despite the higher skill requirement for interpreters.
All of these highly underpaid fields have something in common: they are very well-suited to someone with a bachelor’s in English. Additionally, these fields pay less than an administrative assistant and transcriptionist roles. That is, the New York government will pay you more to take an English audio recording and write it down in English, than if you learned Chinese and took down a Chinese audio recording into English. The more skills you have, the less you get paid. Unsurprisingly, most prospective translators having a BA in English and enrolling in translation programs actually decide they want to be executive assistants or administrative assistants.
Legend has it that China did not launch Masters of Translation programs, but rather launched 150 Masters of Translation and Interpretation programs because the idea that anyone would go to graduate school to be a translator was too bizarre to believe. Translation and Interpretation would be taught simultaneously in the programs based on the theory that graduates would become executive assistants who could occasionally jump in and translate or interpret for their executives, in between taking phone calls and calendaring hot pot lunches. Very tellingly, China has Masters of Interpretation programs and even Conference Interpreter Diploma programs, but no specialized Master of Translation programs. There is a Master of Arts for translation, which does not teach translation, but teaches how to write academic commentary about what translators are doing. When an entire regulatory system is designed around an assumption that translators’ careers will crash and burn, and to prepare them for the eventuality of calendaring appointments and fetching coffee for the rest of their lives, you know career planning in this cohort has hit a snag.
What can would-be translators do about this? First, recognize that there are careers in translation for Chinese to English translators; it’s not hard to find highly successful Chinese translators. However, deep knowledge about a particular industry is highly essential, in particular, finance, law, semiconductors, and telecom have very high levels of demand. Many translators in Shanghai make 350RMB and up an hour working for firms in these fields on an hourly basis in complex projects, and this is for Chinese companies who usually pay 10% of that. Expertise is obviously highly valued, ignorance is not. ATA and CIOL-certified translators making 500RMB (75-85USD+) per hour for translation companies are typical. This is the same pay grade AIIC translators in China get when they charge 7,000RMB per day of conferences, which earned the moniker “the golden rice bowl,” a play on words of Deng Xiaoping’s “iron rice bowl.” And these levels aren’t THAT hard to obtain: you can tell their English is not that great because even these super-elite interpreters don’t seem to know that a bowl you eat rice from, is called a “rice bowl.”
Translators can easily see just how severely neglected industry focus in the profession is by looking at the training programs advertised by big corporations in China for their in-house translators. Huawei did a mini-documentary on their translation teams and how they achieve competence, and described how translators are put through Huawei’s technical support program in order to better understand electronics. Ping’an, a financial services group, requires its translators to study English-language books on finance in order to achieve basic competence. King & Wood Mallesons, a big law firm, does not consider any applicants who lack at least two years of legal translation experience—that is, a candidate with an LLB degree who works for two years as a translator will qualify whereas a candidate who spent 2.5 years earning a Master’s of Translation and Interpreting will not qualify.
What Chinese translators and their clients should pay a lot of attention to is the fact that very few professional translation programs offer courses in these specialties. There is the occasional legal or technical translation course, but these are highly marginalized in translation programs worldwide, and student enrollment in these programs is very low compared to literature and media specialties. The specializations listed on Middlebury’s website, for example, indicate that there is a 100% focus on the media and localization fields, which account for less than 25% of the translation market. For the relatively well-paid remaining 75% of the market, there is little competition and constant talk of shortages.
The bar for admission into the elite world of linguists is actually incredibly low. So why are translators so poor and what can they do about it? The answer is career planning, a topic I’ll elaborate on in a future article.
