Up to seven thousand languages are spoken around the world. Clear, effective communication is essential in today’s globalised world for companies seeking to expand their business and reach a wider audience. There is a growth in demand for translators and interesting opportunities exist in many diverse career sectors.
As a skilled multilingual professional, translators accurately convert legal, scientific and business text from one language to another. You may choose to specialise in a particular field such as medical, legal, financial, scientific or literary, translating books and articles.
The EU, with twenty four official languages, employs translators who must have a perfect command of one European language and a thorough command of two others. They provide linguistic advisory, editing and translation services for financial, legal, policy and scientific documents.
The explosion of e-learning has also created new opportunities for translators to work in video translation and subtitling. Content that may only be available currently in English can now reach global audiences through translation to other languages.
Translators work in multilingual SEO to maximise content for video, websites and ecommerce, in software localisation, video games and publishing. You may prefer to work freelance or through a translation agency, giving you flexibility to fit in with your lifestyle.
Translation has grown in importance including the use of machine translation for speed and cost. An example of this is google translate. Machine translated text requires to be checked and edited by a translator or translation agency to ensure the accuracy and professional quality of the results.
To gain competitive advantage, businesses create personalised experiences in their marketing campaigns to attract customers and foster brand loyalty. Alongside this trend is the growth in the translation industry of "Transcreation". This combines the words “translation” and “creation” and is where marketing content is translated or localised. The original marketing message will remain the same but other content may be translated to reach a new target audience and cultural context.
Check out the exciting range of career opportunities as a Translator here and see how to train as a Translator.