Are there any essential skills or personality traits for in-house work?
It doesn’t suit prima donnas. You need to have good interpersonal skills in a Japanese working environment, and that means being able to go with the flow and play by the rules of the workplace. Freelance work offers more freedom to tell people what you think. You specialize in automotive translation. How did you get started in that field? That was accidental too. I’d been interested in cars since I was a kid, but I didn’t have any background in the field. A couple of decades ago I started working part-time for a printing company whose primary customer is Isuzu and I acquired a lot of field-specific knowledge on the job. What kind of documents do you translate? Mostly technical reports and manuals – especially corrections and additions. Occasionally I work on owners’ manuals, which are fun because the conversational tone allows for more creativity, but most of the material I work on is for mechanics and service people. Over the last 20 years there has been an enormous shift from paper t
It doesn’t suit prima donnas. You need to have good interpersonal skills in a Japanese working environment, and that means being able to go with the flow and play by the rules of the workplace. Freelance work offers more freedom to tell people what you think. You specialize in automotive translation. How did you get started in that field? That was accidental too. I’d been interested in cars since I was a kid, but I didn’t have any background in the field. A couple of decades ago I started working part-time for a printing company whose primary customer is Isuzu and I acquired a lot of field-specific knowledge on the job. What kind of documents do you translate? Mostly technical reports and manuals – especially corrections and additions. Occasionally I work on owners’ manuals, which are fun because the conversational tone allows for more creativity, but most of the material I work on is for mechanics and service people. Over the last 20 years there has been an enormous shift from paper t
