I met Arline Lyons in 2008-2010 when I was working as a translation project manager. I’ve always been really impressed with her professionalism as a translator, so I wanted to talk to her about her study experience and her translation practice. You can find her recent work on sake at Taste Translation and Discover Sake.

• What was your overall path to fluency in Japanese?
  • JET Program
• The importance of immersion in learning Japanese
• What kind of language study did you do while working on JET?
• What does it take to keep your language skills “alive”?
• When and how did you become literate in Japanese?
  • Go, Kaneshiro Kazuki
• How did you decide to get your masters?
• The world of patent translation
  • WIPO
• What is translation memory and how does it work?
  • Translation memory (TM)
  • SDL Trados
• Translation groups
  • Institute of Translation and Interpreting
  • French group
  • German group
  • ITI’s JNET
• How and how much time do freelance translators market themselves?
• What do translators need to pay attention to when adding a new client?
  • Ask a Manager
• What strategies should new translators take when looking for clients?
  • Chris Durbin?
• Subcontracting, direct clients, and machine translation
• When and how did you decide to become more specialized as a translator?
  • Udemy
  • The Open University
  • Wine and Spirit Education Trust
  • International Kikizake-shi
  • John Gauntner’s Sake Professional Course
• When you study specialized terminology, do you study the Japanese terms concurrently with the English?

And at the top I talked about some Google search strategies, which I wrote about for the Japan Times back in April 2018.