# Career Thread



## Alexa10 (Sep 17, 2011)

I was wondering if anybody has any advice for me who wants to maybe major in the foreign language department and wants to translate fiction books. Does it bring in any money? Do you know of any good websites for these types of jobs? I want to learn French, Italian, and Spanish. So I'm practicing using the Rosetta Stone for speaking purposes, and am going to sign up some future foreign-language classes for grammer and reading purposes. Has anybody here made progress using the Rosetta Stone? Is it easier to learn two foreign languages at once, or no? :stu


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## ryobi (Jan 13, 2009)

My brother is a Japanese Translator He translates everything I don't know if you can specialize in what you translate you might just have to take what comes your way???

If I were to learn a language I would learn Chinese


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## Mds (Nov 8, 2011)

I may not know what i'm talking about, but soon enough books are going to probably become completely digital (progressively of course). It may become possible to instantly digitally translate an entire book in seconds with technology. In my opinion, in 20-30 years, this will not be a very income friendly career.


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## Silverella (Sep 17, 2011)

Alexa! did you have a good Thanksgiving? ours was pretty meh. Too many chores to complete, and didn't realize the extent to which everything here would be closed the night of - so tried to go out for a meal, only to find everything was closed, even the supermarket... so we had some cobbled together abomination of chicken tenders and stuffing and cranberry jelly :lol ah well, close enough.

Translation is general a really good area to get into though I agree you probably can't specialize too much, especially at the beginning. But there'll always be work - a friend of mine's daughter is 18 and has just gone to college to study French, but even before that she's made a decent income tutoring younger students in Spanish. 

French/Italian/Spanish are all pretty similar which in some ways will make it easier - on the other hand you might get some words confused between the 3!

Lots of luck and I admire you for learning - I can speak very bad German, aber nur weil es sehr ahnlich zu Englisch ist  I've tried to learn French 3 times but have still managed to forget everything.


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## Alexa10 (Sep 17, 2011)

*Thanks, Silverella!*

Thanks, I had a great Thanksgiving! I don't have a very traditional Thanksgiving at my nonna's(grandmother in Italian) house either. We have Jewish meatball soup, then turkey and the traditional side dishes, then maybe some salad, then fruit, and then desert. Latin languages are actually hard to learn at the same time. At first I started teaching myself French and Italian, but soon got some of the animals confused, so I figure I will learn them one at a time. I heard that there is document translaters, so maybe I should look into that. It's much broader, but I don't know what to narrow it down to. I wouldn't mind translating books/texts at all, just not forms and such. I still have a very long way to go in learning these langauges, though, but I'm trying. I use facebook to practice Italian when talking to my second cousins because facebook unlike Google, is mean and doesn't have a language translater. *insert funny angry face here*


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## persona non grata (Jul 13, 2011)

Foreign languages are useful, but romance languages are best paired with some kind of technical skill (or teaching credential) if you want to maximize the money you can make off of them. It'll let you translate materials that most interpreters can't be hired to. Alternatively, if you learn Arabic, Farsi, or Mandarin, you'll be in better shape than you'd be if you learned the languages you listed. 

You'd probably find use out of learning the romance languages too, but there's already a very significant pool of people who speak them (Spanish especially, in the US) and English in the US. If you just really want to focus on Spanish/Italian/French though, go for it.


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