双语 | 自学9种语言的外国小哥：如何做到“左手翻译，右手旅行”

Benny Lewis毕业于都柏林国立大学电子工程专业，通过自学掌握了西班牙语、法语、德语、意大利语、葡萄牙语、世界语、汉语、荷兰语、爱尔兰语等语种，接受翻译训练后结合自己的专长开始从事翻译工作，并创办了语言学习及旅游网站Fluent in 3 Months。本文是Benny在该网站上分享的自由译者养成记，超贴心哒~~

▲Benny Lewis

Finding translation work

找到翻译工作

I was in a pretty bad situation a few years ago; I had no job or money, my long-term career plan was destroyed and I was going to Canada with no working visa in hand. This forced me to consider online-based work.

前几年里我的处境非常糟糕，没有工作，没有钱，长期的职业规划也毁于一旦，想去加拿大，手头却没有工作签证。这就迫使我不得不考虑在线工作。

There are two good translator social networking websites; Proz and translatorscafé, which have forums and many other features. But the most interesting part of these sites can be their job search boards. The translatorscafé one is free – I can't say much for that since I have never used it.

ProZ.com 和TranslatorsCafe.com是两个非常好的翻译社交网站，里面设有论坛和其他多个板块。但最有趣的当属其中的求职板块。TranslatorsCafe.com是免费的，由于我从未使用过该网站，因此不再多言。

The Proz one has a free version and a paid version; the free version shows you the advertisements after several hours delay, in which time someone else is likely to take the offer. I signed up for a paid account and have found all my other clients through that site. I find that it works pretty well; especially since you can leave and read references, which is great for confirming that they will actually pay you.

ProZ.com有免费版和付费版；免费版的招聘广告会有几个小时的延迟，在这段时间内可能会有其他人获得这份工作。我注册了一个付费账户，并通过该网站找到了其他客户。我发现这个网站经营得相当好，尤其是你可以留下以及查阅推荐信，方便确认客户是否会向你支付薪水。

It is important to have a competitive price! If you have no experience at all, then you should actually start working for next to nothing or for free (or as a volunteer) and have your documents proofread so that you can learn how to actually translate before you start trying it professionally. After my training period, I started off with a kind-of low rate because of my lack of experience and then I raised my price last after a while.

重要的是价格要有竞争力！如果你完全没有经验，刚开始工作的时候就不应期望太多，可尝试免费工作（或做志愿者），并且让他人来校对你的译文，这样在变得专业之前可以学习如何真正地进行翻译。培训结束后我便开始工作，由于经验不足，因此价格偏低，一段时间后才有所提高。

Many translators charge per word, which I much prefer to all my previous monthly wage jobs since I get paid for the actual work that I do. The current global economic situation seemed to have caught up with me that summer as I had no work at all for over a month. I've reduced my price back to the previous one and have gotten a flood of work because of it.

对比之前的月结工资，我更喜欢译员按字收费的方式，因为这是根据实际工作获得相应的酬劳。当前全球的经济形势似乎像那年夏天的我一样低迷，当时我整整一个月没有接到任何工作。我把价格降低到之前的水平，随后便有大批工作向我涌来。

The actual price you charge depends on a lot of factors; those who translate novels, for example, may charge much more per word than I do (or would charge per page), but our hourly wage is about the same. As an engineer, I was very familiar with the technical documents I translated and never needed to ponder over a more poetic way to say it (as a writer-translator would for example) so I could charge less but still earn the same because I would produce more words an hour.

你的实际价格取决于很多因素，比如，翻译小说的译员对每个字的收费（或每页的收费）可能会比我的多，但是我们的时薪基本相同。作为一名工程师，我对技术文件非常熟悉，可从来没想过要以一种更诗意的方式去翻译（如撰译员可能会这样做），因此虽然我的收费更低，但我每小时翻译的字数更多，最后挣得的报酬还是一样的。

Also, the language combination is very important – you may be able to charge more for a language that is more in demand, or need to be more competitive if you have a common language combination.

此外，语言组合至关重要——对需求高的语种可以收取更多费用，若你的语言组合很常见，那就需要让自己变得更具竞争力。

The importance of a good background and specialization

拥有好的背景知识及专长很重要

Becoming a translator definitely isn't for everyone! Translators do not get the credit they deserve. When you do read a translation and don't realize it, that's the sign of a good translator! Always an unsung hero, because it doesn't seem like it was ever even originally in a foreign language!

并不是所有人都能做翻译！译员也没有享受到应有的名誉。如果你在读译文时没有发现翻译的痕迹，就说明译者的水平很高。译员始终是幕后英雄，因为好的译文甚至让人感觉不出来原文是用外语写的！

Translating a text isn't a simple task of writing over the words in a text document, which “anyone” with casual understanding of the source language and being a native in the target language can do. You need to understand the source language extremely well and at a professional level.

翻译一份文稿并不是对文中的字词进行改写那么简单，也不是对源语有大致了解、母语为译入语的人就能做到的，而是需要对源语有深刻理解，达到专业程度。

However, you can't be a translator just because you speak another language, even if you speak it really well. You need training and experience as a translator and complete familiarity with the subject you are translating.

虽然如此，并不是说会讲另一种语言就能做翻译，哪怕你讲得再好。想要做翻译，你需要接受培训，积累相关经验，并对你所翻译的领域绝对熟悉。

Any translation work that I accepted was always just for my fields of speciality, mostly related to my studies in Electronic Engineering. Thanks to my studies and work experience both in Ireland and abroad, when I translated a document I wrote as an engineer / computer scientist naturally would, and do so only in English.

我之前接受的翻译工作都是自己的专业领域，大部分与我所研究的电子工程学相关。多亏了自己在爱尔兰和国外的学习与工作经历，我在翻译文件时行文就如同工程师或计算机科学家那样流畅，不过也只针对英语。

And specialization should not be taken lightly either! When I was training to be a translator, it was extremely frustrating that I would get documents from a wide range of topics, none of which I was familiar with. I tried to translate wine cultivation techniques, legal and medical documents, corporate presentations etc. and it was always a disaster! Luckily all of my work was proofread and completely corrected each time before actually being used.

专长也不容小觑。我在接受翻译培训时担心会接到各种话题的文件，都是不熟悉的领域，搞得自己很绝望。我尝试翻译过酿酒技术、法律与医学文件、公司介绍等等，每次结果都很糟糕！幸好所有译文在正式采用前都经过了校对和彻底改正。

I am not a lawyer or a doctor or a wine-lover so I simply can't write about these topics in English, let alone understand them in a foreign language! This means that I should have never translated them of course. I do not have a degree in translation, but I actually found it easier to get work than some people that I have talked with who do, because I focused on a very narrow selection of documents to translate that I could write very naturally.

我不是律师，也不是医生，更不是爱酒人士，所以不会用英语描述这些领域的内容，更不用说在外语环境下去理解它们了！这意味着或许我根本不该去翻译这些。我没有取得翻译学位，但事实上我发现自己比之前聊过的一些有翻译学历的人更容易找到工作，因为我专注的翻译领域很窄，能自如应对这些领域的文件。

Being more flexible in your translation topics does not necessarily make you more employable since you may have little or no familiarity or authority in that field. Someone who has studied translation in university needs to somehow also become an expert in any fields they wish to translate.

在翻译话题上更加灵活并不意味着一定更能胜任工作，因为你对这些领域可能知之甚少或不够权威，在大学研究翻译的人也需要在某种程度上成 49 31054 49 15289 0 0 3673 0 0:00:08 0:00:04 0:00:04 3673自己想要翻译的领域的专家。

Doing the work

工作开展

So when you've got the translation, you just open up the Word document and replace the original text, right? Some translators may work like that, but it is horribly inefficient and cumbersome for the kinds of documents I translated! We have Computer Aided Translation (CAT) tools (not to be confused with Machine Translation!) that help us translate more efficiently and are especially useful in translations with recurring vocabulary (legal, technical etc.).

当你拿到需要翻译的文件时，通常会先打开一个word文档，再放上原文，对吗？有些译员也许是这样操作的，但就我所翻译的文件来说，这种做法是相当低效而冗繁的！我们可以利用计算机辅助翻译工具（CAT）（千万不要和“机器翻译”搞混了！）来更加高效地进行翻译，特别是当翻译中涉及许多重复词汇的时候（如法律、技术词汇等）。

These tools can produce a file called a Translation Memory (TM), which lets you or other translators work with the same theme later and not lose consistency in terminology, and you can even translate faster as it points out and automatically replaces repetitions.

这些工具能够生成一个叫做“翻译记忆”的文件，这样，你或其他译员在以后的工作中就能翻译相同主题的文件，并保持术语的一致性。同时，这些工具还能够指出并自动替换重复的部分，帮助译员翻译得更快。

For those interested in starting off with this, I recommend installing the free Open Source CAT tool OmegaT (along with the free Open Office suite). Unfortunately, many outsourcers much prefer to work with the TMs produced by Trados, which is quite expensive.

对于一些想快速上手CAT的人来说，我推荐安装免费的公开资源CAT工具OmegaT（以及免费办公室软件套件Open Office）。但可惜的是，很多外包商都喜欢用价格很昂贵的Trados所生成的翻译记忆。

I used to work with Wordfast, which I also quite liked. If you'd like to buy these programs, you should actually do it through the Proz website, since they have huge group-paying reductions for all the major CAT tools, cycling through each one regularly. There is quite a learning curve with these programs, so it's definitely better to start with the free version and you may never need to change!

我以前经常使用Wordfast，这款软件我也很喜欢。你可以上Proz网站购买这些程序，有些主要的CAT工具经常会有很大的团购优惠，轮流打折。想要掌握这些工具，必须要经过一段学习过程，所以当然一开始使用免费的会更好，也许你永远都不用换！

Making it location-independent

不受地域限制

Once you can work from home, why can't that home be on the other side of the planet? Since my clients transferred payments to my bank account, I could take it out of an ATM in any country and use it there.

既然你能在家工作，那么你的家又何尝不能位于地球的另一边呢？我的客户都是直接把钱打给我，所以我能在任何国家的提款机取款，在当地消费。

I rented a Skype telephone number so that I didn't have to bother my clients with new number changes as I traveled. I actually had the same fixed phone number for the last few years that forwards any calls to whatever mobile number that I happen to have at the time.

我租了一个Skype电话号码，所以不用因为旅行随时换号而给我的客户带来烦恼。其实过去几年，我一直有个固定的电话号码，可以将所有呼叫都转接到我正在使用的新号码上。

Emails require immediate responses, so when I don't have work on some particular day I can still leave the house but I have my iPhone push new emails to me and notify me of them. There have been some time-zone issues, but I've found work-arounds and have comfortably traveled with this job.

邮件往往需要即时回复，所以当我不工作时，我仍然可以走出家门，我的iPhone可以提醒我收到新邮件了。有时也会有时区问题，但我已经解决了这个问题，能够在工作的同时自在地旅游。

英文来源：Fluent in 3 Months 网站

编译：Yee君

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