I did some translation this past weekend, a pretty lame video script for a Japanese electronics company. Their premise was that aliens had come to Earth to get all the company's latest products because they are just so darn advanced. Right, like anyone is going to travel through space to pick up an Earth manufactured TV-- and a CRT at that, not even a plasma tv.
I've done just a handful of jobs in the couple of months I've been back here. It's not a bad way to make money so I'm thinking maybe I should try to drum up more business again. A few years back I was translating 30 hours a week in addition to my teaching job and while it made for an impressive income source, it also left me with no life. I would wake up a few hours before I had to leave for school to work on a job, come home from school and work all evening and then spend all my weekends working too. Not too surprising that I burned out on it after a while.
Translating is not bad as far as jobs go. I can make my own hours, wear whatever I want, turn down jobs if the timing is inconvenient, and it is a form of writing that I actually enjoy, at times. Reading and comprehending the Japanese is not a problem. (Twenty years on task paid off after all.) The tricky part is to express in English the intent of the original text in a way that doesn't sound stilted, ridiculous or just plain wrong. Someone reading a well-done translation should never know that it's a translation at all, but that usually involves a bit of deviation from the original and some Japanese clients are not comfortable if they can't map sentence for sentence, or even word for word, to the original. That used to bother me and I'd occasionally compain about it, but now I figure it makes more sense to please the customer, even if what the customer wants sometimes sounds goofy to me.