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RE: My Life as a Japanese Translator
Good job figuring out the best way to use your skills to make yourself happy. I had an American friend in Ecuador who was a Chinese translator. Like you, she didn't have any trouble getting the amount of work she wanted; since Asian languages are harder to learn for English speakers, as you noted, fewer people learn them. Translation seems like a nice location-independent gig.
I once helped an Israeli writer choose the English translator for his book by looking at the same page translated by seven different people. It was fascinating to see the differences among the translations.
Yes, people sometimes questioned the wisdom of my major, but it's exactly its scarcity that has been my advantage with it.
There is no such thing as a perfect translation, increasingly as the languages become more different from one another. It's always a balance between literal accuracy and meaning and feeling that each translator calculates in their own unique inner way. I know people who have learned a language just to read certain books. It's the truth that you simply can't read what the original author wrote by reading a translation (maybe much less true with extremely similar languages like Spanish and Italian), but it's a new work in its own right, a collaboration between author and translator.
Literal translations just don't work, especially for fiction. Each language has its own structure and rhythm. I think translation is an underappreciated skill, especially now that machines can sort of do the job. But anyone who has used Google Translate knows its limitations. It's like proofreading. Machine grammar and spell checkers are great for finding extra spaces and some spelling errors, but terrible at a lot of other tasks; they mark errors that aren't errors and miss actual errors.
(Sorry, this is super late, but I just saw this.)
Yes, and although translators are threatened by machine translation, there are certain fields of translation that I think will always be around. Many classics have been translated multiple times, like The Tale of Genji or War & Peace. A machine could even learn to produce translations with multiple different styles, but it can't be Edward Seidensticker or Richard Pevear.