It’s an interesting conundrum. The world is getting smaller and smaller thanks to the rapid expansion of global media and information technology. In turn, the need for interpreters and translators is getting bigger and bigger. Because of this, the profession is going through a hiring surge that hasn’t been seen in many a year.
While there are many people who can speak their native language fluently with a smattering of another, one isn’t a translator/interpreter unless they are completely fluent in two, minimum.There are those who actually want people who are fluent in many more, such as the United Nations.On the other hand, what languages one wants to learn is dependent on the individual, although it should be noted professionals who can converse in the more common languages of the world - such as French, English, Mandarin, or Spanish - will have more work than those who aren’t fluid in these predominant languages.
If there usually is one thing they all share, it’s they usually grew up in a multi-lingual environment. Most translators could have been the children of parents working overseas or immigrants, have other family members who only spoke another language or did their share of travel in one form or another.
Still, speaking a language and being fluent in it are two different things. Interpreters usually also took more than one language while they were in high school. They also got adept at navigating around a computer.
They also continued studying their various languages when they got to college by enrolling with an on campus or online university with strong linguistics courses, if not outright degrees. Indeed, one thing one might do is also look for an institute of higher learning that also just happens to have good schools in the sciences or business.
That’s because a translator who can speak scientific or business terminology in several languages is extremely more desirable than one who just studied literature.
However, what will make a person even more desirable to a recruiter is if they had some life experience in both countries. It doesn’t matter if they were exchange students or just visiting family in the “old country”, hiring authorities value that kind of life experience more than anything else.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports the mean salary of interpreters/translators as over $40,000 annually. Much is dependent on the languages spoken and who the person is working for. For instance, multinational companies and media concerns tend to pay more than universities or federal agencies and the U.N.
The Bureau also notes the U.S. employs slightly over 51,000 as of 2009. It projects the number of positions will grow to 62,000 by 2020. Because of this, it ranks the professions as “exceedingly good”. It should also be noted that 26% of all translators and interpreters are self-employed.
Yet when one considers that kind of need coming over the next few years, one can expect that translators and interpreters will have a lot of work coming their way for quite a while.
Surprisingly, these on line degree programs can be taken from a distance in conjunction with online degree classes. This is particularly helpful when one is in a country, trying to learn the language for a career, with online school providing the technical instructions while the students gets practical real life application.
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