@Kevin-S said in Questions about a translator's career:
It seems reasonable to suspect that the market for translation into Finninsh is probably smaller than the market for translation into, say, English, but that's something you won't really know until you get out there. So while remaining realistic about your prospects, I'd urge you not to dismiss anything out of hand.
True enough. At least for English/Finnish, large amount of my doubts stem from the fact Finnish people (aside from older generations) usually have a very strong grasp of written English, but of course it doesn't necessarily mean there isn't any English/Finnish translation work around. And I do have a lot more hope for the Japanese/Finnish market.
It sounds like you have a pretty good attitude (and situation) as regards this. Remember that especially as a freelancer, there's a process of building up. There's a good chance you won't just show up and start making enough money; instead, you'll take projects as they come (or, more importantly, as you go out find them) and build a list of steady clients, and after a while you'll have reliable sources of work and income. The build-up is the phase where having a safety net like your family to fall back on really comes in handy. Just remember not to panic if you don't see the amount of money you're hoping for in the first months or even years.
Thank you very much for the advice, I'll definitely keep it in mind for the future for when I'm ready to start making a career.
This is a big, big question, and no two people completely agree on the answer, so I'm not going to go too far into it here. Suffice to say that machine translation (MT) clearly will have some kind of effect on the market. Some people hold that "humanities"-type fields like literature (including light novels) are immune to too much competition from MT, on the assumption that machines will never learn to capture nuance with the precision of a human translator, and/or that they won't effectively cope with facets of the Japanese language like subject omission. To a certain extent that may be true, but having seen the way technology has developed over just the last couple of decades, I'm not prepared to say anything is outside the realm of possibility. At the very least, cases in which human translators edit MT output, rather than translating from scratch, seem likely to increase, especially in fields where there's anything like boilerplate.
Having said all that, I've seen at least one person argue that much of the effect of MT will come in the form of market expansion, with MT opening up new projects and possibilities. In other words, it could make the pie bigger, instead of simply consuming what's already there. Again, no one can be sure. It's a good thing to keep in mind and keep an eye on, but the most we can say is that it's something we (translators) will have to adapt to as the technology develops, whatever form it ultimately takes.
I see... I guess we'll just have to wait and see whether the pie will become smaller or bigger and by how much. Thanks for your thoughts on the matter. For now, I've seen fan translations of That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime with MT output and human editor, but the quality certainly wasn't something that would be acceptable by any publishers - yet, I was still surprised by how readable it was.
