I'm seeing a lot of discourse in my TL about an otome game kickstarter that's skating by on $7,000. I spent years doing the "Otome games for peanuts" work, and this is entirely unsurprising to me.
It's really difficult to put into words how hard it was for me to get out of that work and into more mainstream games. I definitely wouldn't have survived on that pay if I wasn't married and in a dual-income family, for one thing.
Those agencies don't provide mentorship, references, networking, or even meaningful work feedback most of the time. You exist in a vacuum with no team-based communication - your only contact is the project manager. You are isolated, in other words.
You proofread your own work, no editor. Arguably this can be one way to force a rookie TL to shape up with no "training wheels" in the form of someone else coming after them to fix their stilted dialogue, but the reality is that the job title of editor exists for a reason.
The result is that you have someone who is constantly overworked, overcriticized, and exposed to the risk of pay delays as a result of arbitrary invoice processing procedures and "client delays", and never given the info or resources to find better work. Who's going to tell them?
I can't tell someone in this position, "Just stop taking the work, you're worth more than that". They don't have a fallback. They don't have another, better paying agency waiting to take them in and give them a steady income stream if they would just make their stand.
What I CAN say to people in this position is that it gets better. You'll never get a promotion or a pay raise at that agency, but there ARE people and places out there who want to help you and hook you up with the kind of proper paying work you're interested in.
For example, @Garyou_Tensei is an incredible force of networking in the Japanese translation community. I love watching him play "matchmaker" and help to marry translators to groups that provide a perfect fit for their skillset/interests.
My other advice is to proactively seek out better agencies. Sometimes they won't respond, but a lot of the time, they're ready to give anybody a translation test and measure their chops firsthand.
(I'm developing a test of my own to help rookies—More on that later.)
(I'm developing a test of my own to help rookies—More on that later.)
Since this thread's gained a bit of traction, I'd like to add one request.
If you see someone in this kind of position, please take any opportunity you can to be a friend or a sempai to that person. One good word-of-mouth referral is all it takes to get someone out of this rut.
If you see someone in this kind of position, please take any opportunity you can to be a friend or a sempai to that person. One good word-of-mouth referral is all it takes to get someone out of this rut.
