I’m currently working as an english teacher in Taipei and since I’m already quite familiar with the language and continuing to study it, I was thinking of doing a Master’s in translation program at one of the universities here.
Has anyone worked in the translation industry before, freelance or otherwise? What kind of pay do you get from doing Chinese to English? Because what I hear from Taiwanese doing English to Chinese, the pay is very little even relative to the average Taiwanese salary.
Auntie Peng @Icon and @the_bear can chime in on this, but from what I’ve noticed and from what friends tell me, if you’re doing translations of documents, and paid by word, pay is kind of…meh.
The big money comes with instant translations where you are following someone around and doing live translations in their ear. Ever watch variety shows when Korean pop stars come over and there’s that lady that sits behind them and translates? She’s making bank.
You don’t make good money working for the agencies. If you can get your own clients then you can ask NTD 2.5 per character. So a 3000 character day would earn you 7500, which is good. But you need to somehow find those clients. Otherwise its around NTD1 per character. In-house expect salaries of between 60,000 to 80,000 as a translation editor. I wouldn’t work inhouse as a translator.
Have a couple Taiwanese friends who do it. Had one friend (ShiDa Master’s) who was making 80k/month for a US tech company (great money), but then the company started doing a lot more stuff with the machine translation software that is hitting the market these days, so they dropped her & her team to 40k/month (less work basically), and it became more of a copy editing job than real translation… they were just checking what the machine produced. As a professional translator that felt like a slap in the face to her, not to mention the huge pay cut.
Takes years of training, pretty competitive, you have to be good. Then you have to hustle for clients. And the future is uncertain with the leaps & bounds being made by machine translation. Not a field I would get involved in as a young person today.
Something like localization project management though… I think there is a future in that. So if you have language skills already, maybe think about building up the PM skills so that you can manage a whole localization project, rather than just crunch out the translation which is the piece that increasingly will be done by software.
Isn’t that gig referred to as being an interpreter as opposed to translator?
The one who can chime in is @ironlady because she did a program and worked as translator/interpreter.
Yes, lots of money with interpretation, but very small market -meaning guanxi, agencies and all that jazz.
Inhouse salaries on the ball.
Any reason why you wouldn’t work in house?
Making a good living from this is starting to look like an uphill battle.
Most inhouse translators are local, high output/low quality. You wouldn’t get the recognition for the higher quality of your work. Even as a a translation editor salaries have been dragged down from 80K to 60K because of all the ABC/TBA types who come back from the US with near-near-native English language skills but fuck all employment opportunities.
I got NT $2.85 per character through an agency, no guanxi on my end. 
Unless translation is something that you really enjoy doing, it’s probably not a good career choice. In general, it’s difficult, boring and poorly paid work. And in Taiwan, especially, there’s little appreciation for quality.
Unusual though, that means their customer is prepared to pay top dollar. I’ve only ever got that from direct clients. But I’m not a great translator tbh.
Plus it is mentally exhausting and wears you down, especially if you do it every day. At the end, you will go home with a little sticker saying My name is X and I live in Y. We were warned about that by our professors. now I believe them.
What do you mean?
Your brain will shrink to the size of Paddington Bear’s and you will require adult supervision for the rest of your life.
Ahhh, now I get it. Heh
Not funny at all.
Here’s how the freelance market for translation in Taiwan has been over the past couple of decades.
1990s: great. Good pay, low cost of living. Few native speakers on the market. Downside: clients don’t have a clue about whether an English document is well-written or not, so many won’t pay a premium for native English.
2000s: okay. Rates starting to come down. More online “kitchen table” agencies started by people without a clue about the industry but with an Internet connection, acting strictly as middlemen without adding any value to the transaction. More responsibilities put onto translators (“Do you have a proofreader you regularly work with?”) and expected to be provided at the basic rate of pay. I didn’t work for less than NT$2 at this time; used to get NT$3 from MOFA, more from certain private clients. Clients would sometimes offer to diddle the payment structure (“We can pay you the editing fee as well as the translation fee to make the rate higher”, etc.)
2010s: Rates going down, agencies proliferating, machine translation on the upswing, crowdsourced translation sites exploding. Even overseas, prices for Chinese>English are plummeting due to huge market entry by people in China and India (yeah, not native or even good English writers but who cares when the rates are so low?) There are still some higher-end clients (either end users or “good” agencies) but many are long-term clients I’ve had for 10 years or more, and some are disappearing quietly, often turning to cheaper alternatives. Because, you know, my secretary can just “fix” the English. More and more, agencies are just databases with an online interface. Translators are expected to “enter their details”, “update their details” and even, in some cases, “keep your availability current” (like I have time to go onto the web sites of 500+ agency clients and “update” my weekly availability).
The worse the economy gets, the more people decide that translation is an easy way to pick up a few extra bucks, which then pushes rates lower again.
My friends who are established freelance translators in Taiwan are now doing more “other things” than translations because the workload/offers is dropping so much. I can’t speak for salaried positions; I never held one in this industry.
The point about interpreting is that there is no market. Not in Taiwan, and hardly any more anywhere else. There is little demand for simultaneous interpretation (which is what pays what people consider to be the “big bucks”) and established interpreters jealously guard their connections and clients. In Taiwan, that means the first generation of simultaneous interpreters who grew up abroad, are double-As, and who have connections because Daddy is a minister of this or that. New clients tend to advertise anew for every. single. job (both for translation and interpretation) which is very frustrating if you’ve done a job well for them last time but apparently that “doesn’t count” anymore if there might be someone who will do it this time for $5 less. And the translation and interpreting programs continue to push out graduates. I’ve been favorably impressed with the language skills of many of the students in the programs of late, but I have absolutely no idea where these people are going to find a job in Taiwan, unless it’s as faculty teaching at a new T&I program at some outside-Taipei university or college. That would be about the only growth opportunity I see – being a lecturer at a college that has an undergraduate language program and wants to provide interpreting classes for them, not with the expectation that they will ever work conferences, but just to improve their language and maybe set them up to interpret for visitors to a company or something.
I myself am seriously wondering if I will be able to finish out my working years doing translation and interpreting. I’m in the States now, but I would have the same concerns in Taiwan (and have for some years now). I strongly believe that the years when someone could make a living only because s/he spoke reasonable Chinese (or even very good Chinese) are past. I’ve been fortunate to be able to do that so far but I don’t see an easy way forward with it even for the next 10 years or so.
Is it really that bad? I never had any problem finding work, and I’m much less experienced than you. It’s still quite easy to make a good living doing translation in Taiwan if you work mostly for foreign clients. And I’ve never had an agency asking me to “update” my weekly availability. They just email me when they have a job available.
Ironlady has her own strong views on the current state of the translation industry, but in my experience you can still make a good living from Chinese to English translation…