Wednesday, February 06, 2008

Ave, Charles!

It's official: Charles plunges into the wild and wacky world of la pédagogie. Not English teaching, mind you! No, Charles has made it clear he'd rather stay away from that racket. He will instead be teaching at the Graduate School of Interpretation and Translation at HUFS (Hankuk University of Foreign Studies), and "for the first time in [his] life [he] will have an actual salary." I bet it's going to be less than what he was making through freelance translation work. Luckily for Charles, he's got that Permanent Resident visa, so he can do almost anything he wants, including freelance work along with his full-time job (his note mentions work he's doing for The Translation Institute).

I've never tried my hand at professional translation. While I probably wouldn't be a first-tier translator from English into French, given how much French I've forgotten, I'd do a decent job from French to English. I charge W15,000 per 250 words when proofreading resumes, cover letters, research papers, etc., but I wonder what I'd charge for translation, which is significantly harder work...


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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

We work with Alexandria Translations and they charge us about 20 cents per translated word. YEAH! OH! NO?!!

Anonymous said...

It's tough to compare salaries and freelance payments. While it's true that I can make a lot of money per hour doing freelance work, a salary takes into account a lot of other things--most importantly, it's something I can count on.

Of course, I'll still be able to do freelance work. A lot of translation work gets shuffled through the school, and I was told that I could basically take on as much extra work as I felt I could handle. I think for the first year I might not go too crazy with that, seeing as how many other things I have to do. But it's nice to know it's there.