LANGUAGE LEARNING
How I Became a Translator in Less Than 3 Years
No 3. I was neither a picky eater nor drinker
It was 7 a.m. The rain was shelling the makeshift tin roof above me as I took a moment to re-read the last scene.
I was sitting in my local coffee shop’s outdoor area just as I had recent mornings prior. I left my last job two months ago to pursue freelance translation more seriously.
Sitting outside a coffee shop was my office, and I’d just landed my first significant translation gig two days ago: translating a full film script. I felt the same pride and relief that greets arriving travelers following a distant journey.
With the white noise of dense rain, fresh coffee, and a Double Happiness 1906 cigarette, I took a moment to reflect on how far I’d come, how hard I worked, and how happy I was to be getting paid to sit at a cafe and deconstruct a language with which I’d fallen in love.
My strategy for getting there was simple, but the stakes were high.
I was twenty-eight, in a mass of college debt (still am), with a soul-enriching degree in philosophy (still is), little cash (little better), no marketable skills (changed that), and working a job with no perceivable potential (changed that, too).
I needed a voyage, but it had to be one facilitating growth. One that would allow me to make college debt payments comfortably, save, and return with a marketable skill — preferably spending the least amount of money possible.
Then it hit me.
1. I Moved to China
This approach couldn’t be any more straightforward. Physically dropping yourself into a language and culture will instantly boost the speed you pick up a language — 100 percent of the time — because it makes learning a matter of survival.
Well, let’s be honest, you wouldn’t die. But you would encounter a few rather embarrassing situations. For example, a three-minute walk to the subway could turn into a 5k event you didn’t sign up for or worse, find your bladder well beyond the limits of its flexibility. Neither of those seems pleasant.
At the very least, you’ll need some sentence patterns and related vocabulary for navigational well-being. Your well-being as a whole, alone in a foreign land, must be your top priority.
If you decide to relocate alone or otherwise, heed this advice:
Do it with a clear conscience.
If you don’t, you could end up prolonging the difficulty of your cultural adjustment, which I’ll be the first to say isn’t pretty. Be sure to say your proper goodbyes, don’t leave anyone behind, nor bear the weight of any unnecessary pressure. As the old military adage goes,
“Don’t pack what you can’t carry.”
Some of life’s weights are simply too heavy to carry and therefore shouldn’t be.
2. I Deliberately Avoided Western Culture
I wasn’t interested in pub crawls or Halloween parties in Western neighborhoods. I even avoided McDonald’s (no I didn’t). As long as I was living in China, I remained committed to living, working, and socializing as the Chinese do.
I befriended many colleagues, their family and friends, and sometimes people who approached me randomly. I sang their songs at karaoke, showed them my favorite noodle and stationery shops, and wielded chopsticks like a champ (not without a few initial weeks of pain and clumsiness). By burying myself in the throes of a foreign culture, I guaranteed myself an additional reinforcement of consistent language learning.
3. I Was Neither a Picky Eater Nor Drinker
At first glance, this may seem irrelevant. If it does, you may not be familiar with how culturally significant food is to the Chinese.
If you’re Chinese with an affable palate for cuisine and can handle a few slugs of baijiu, you’re great company. If you can do the same as a foreigner, you might as well be the Second Coming.
Showing a willingness to try new cuisines, adopt one or two cultural habits (even if they’re bad), and be an upstanding ambassador of your own culture is an excellent formula for cultural exchange. Besides the obvious linguistic advantages, you’ll build friendships for a lifetime — something you may find useful being so far from home.
4. I Learned to Accept and Endure Embarrassment
Dear me, how I hated to fail. I hated misspeaking, stumbling, and taking forever to translate in my head what I wanted to say aloud. Grammatical errors, tonal errors, and misunderstandings happened in practically every conversation I had, nor was it unusual to be a victim of laughter.
For a long time, the number of those occurrences remained steady, but I forged my resilience stronger by learning to accept them. I was terrified of the fire, but I had to let it burn.
The reality of learning a foreign language, or really anything that’s wholly foreign to you, is that you have to fail. And the more frequently you do, the better. Whether you choose to run from it or embrace it will play a direct role in how quickly your skills improve.
5. I Was “Pesteringly” Curious
Being naturally inquisitive is a helpful trait to have when you’re learning anything. If you’re not, an excellent way to acquire it is to add a sense of urgency. Because I wanted to learn Chinese as quickly as possible, I didn’t have time to decipher rules and exceptions Chinese textbooks couldn’t adequately explain. I had to ask people; all the time.
While standing in line for bubble tea, I asked a stranger to explain the difference between synonyms. Friends knew me to turn otherwise benign taxi rides into a Chinese version of Taxicab Confessions, except the driver was the one spilling it. And I habitually looked for openings to chat with people.
By peering into culture through the lives of those that shape it, you gain access to worlds you could only previously observe from the outside. This process is incredibly enriching and equally fruitful for developing the cultural nuances of a language.
6. I Used a Three-Step Filter for Learning Vocabulary
Learning Chinese is a bit of a tricky endeavor when it comes to learning vocabulary because it’s a tonal language. Tonal languages rely on pitch and intonation to distinguish words and their meaning.
That leaves you responsible for learning five aspects of a Chinese character: recognition, writing, pinyin (romanized spelling), its meaning(s), and the tone(s) associated with it.
That’s a lot to learn. So if you want to build your vocabulary on a strong foundation, you’ll want to learn and review it from a few different angles. I set up a “filtration system” to sharpen my familiarity with new words and solidify the old.
One helpful consistent I always kept in check was to study an identical batch of words across all of my flashcard and writing sets. If I added twenty-five to one, then I’d add the same twenty-five to another.
Arguably the best mobile Chinese dictionary on the market. I purchased the Professional Bundle for $60 and never saw a need to find anything more reliable. Pleco offers various useful features like breakdowns of character parts and etymology.
I wore their flashcard builder into the ground. Pleco also allows you to create your own flashcard sets and test yourself according to the aspect you want to work on most (tone, meaning, recognition, etc.). Pleco is an indispensable resource for learning Chinese.
You can download Anki as a mobile app or desktop application. It’s an extensively customizable flashcard software based on spaced repetition, which tests your knowledge at preset intervals of time. So when you get a word right two days in a row, it’ll show you again five days later, then again in another ten days, and so on, depending on how you’ve set your intervals. Anki is an incredible resource for learning any vocabulary — not just a language’s.
Learning vocabulary is a process that cannot stop. If you’re not learning new, you should be reviewing the old. It would be naive to assume even your foundational vocabulary, which starts around a thousand for any committed pupil of Chinese, would stay fresh by mere random encounters. It won’t.
Old-fashioned Handwriting
I spent countless hours in coffee shops writing. I wrote characters, their meanings, practiced their radicals, random sentences, fictional conversations. I copied dialogue from film and television subtitles. I copied passages from books. Over. And over. It was a pure effort of blood and sweat. It was an attempt to drill information with unrelenting force: a study habit not unfamiliar to any native Chinese student.
7. I Seized Practically Every Opportunity to Study
My day started by reviewing or learning new vocabulary during breakfast. That gave me a solid fifteen minutes. I’d continue once I’d reached the bus stop, where I’d wait ten to fifteen minutes. The bus ride was another ten minutes. I’d get off, walk down into the subway station where I’d wait, study, hop on the train, and continue studying until I reached downtown.
When I arrived at work, it was usually about 7 a.m. That gave me another hour to an hour and a half undisturbed before people started showing up. Work responsibilities usually wouldn’t take me longer than a few hours. I used the rest of the time of day to study.
No one ever looked at me sideways if I was studying in the office because the stronger my grip tightened on the language, the more it increased my value to the company.
If I went out for lunch alone, I was studying. If everyone was sleeping — as is customary — when I returned, I studied.
I studied back on the subway home, on the bus, and during dinner.
After dinner, I went to a coffee shop to write and study grammar or to a bar where I’d likely end up trying to blend in by looking at my phone, studying.
I’m not superhuman. There were plenty of days “I didn’t feel like it.” But when those days or moments occurred, I opted to learn passively, which meant I was probably listening to Xuē Zhīqiān, a podcast well above my ability, or watching a Chinese movie with English subtitles.
Even so. I still had extended and brief periods where I didn’t pick up anything. But the advantage of living in China meant I was still learning every day.
8. I Just Asked
Sometimes breaking into an industry in which you have no experience requires you to just put yourself out there, shamelessly. Being afraid to expose yourself out of fear of embarrassment or rejection will never get you into that new gallery. Your book will never get published. You’ll never get the job.
I reached out to dozens of translation companies in my province and elsewhere. Some ignored me. Others turned into opportunities to proofread and edit recently translated work. The remaining few didn’t care about my lack of experience. They just gave me a translation test. I either passed or not. If it was the former, it led to doing actual translation work.
That’s how I got in.
The strategies I used to learn Chinese and become a translator do not apply to any discipline. But the one I started with does:
If I work really hard, then ask for an opportunity, I can make it happen.
To become a translator, I had to prove my adequacy in a language. Employers don’t care if I studied it at a university or in a coffee shop or if I took a proficiency test or not. The only thing that mattered was my ability to show proficiency. I worked really hard and asked for an opportunity. When companies allowed me the opportunity to work on a test sample, I did the best I could to prove what I’d learned.
You’d also be surprised to hear how little I spent financially to acquire Chinese. These days, there are so many free and cheap resources available to learn a skill there’s hardly any reason to spend money at all. There is a mass of information to be learned on edX, Coursera, Udemy, Khan Academy, and the like.
If you want to learn graphic design, coding, woodworking, or anything else that requires a particular skill, you can use this strategy. Telling you to work really hard and don’t quit wouldn’t be helpful. Your desire to succeed has to come from within you. And when it does, there are enough resources out there to provide you with the knowledge you need to acquire a new skill — most of which allow you to work at your own pace, which means, if you’ve got the time, you can learn rather quickly.
So many of us now look to make a career change because the pandemic’s collateral damage has laid us off, closed our businesses, and caused us to reconsider our existential perspectives. There’s still time to pursue a career you think you’d be happier in. Work really hard (build a portfolio if appropriate) and ask for an opportunity. You’ll get there in no time.
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