Month: November 2023

I attended a business-related Vietnam-Japan program last week, tagging along with my brother.

Sometime ago, it was a hot topic that Vietnam Airlines would be entering into service at Hiroshima Airport but we’ve never heard the progress or start thereafter. It has been postponed a while but the project now resumes. During the three-hour-long event, there were also presentations about businesses in Vietnam by some Japanese companies, an introduction of vocational development programs by a Vietnamese university in Khanh Hoa province, and a ceremony for business memorandum between Hiroshima and Khanh Hoa. Obviously I’m not specialized in any of these fields but I found them pretty interesting.

Hiroshima has received many Vietnamese students and business persons at various organizations and entities: Japanese language schools, universities, corporations, just like other prefectures. You can therefore see many Vietnamese residents who have settled down in Hiroshima. Looking back on my time at a university as an International Student Advisor, I’ve had an impression that they are kind and very eager to learn and work hard.

Accepting Human Resources between Vietnam and Japan has been more proactive and promoted. The mean age of population in Vietnam is relatively young and 33 (while that of Japan is 48 or around). The momentum I felt at the event also indicated that those proactive exchange would definitely be one of clues to empower Japan, where its aging society and labor scarcity are concerned.

Pic: a simultaneous interpretation receiver for Vietnamese and Japanese 🎧

Translation is just a part of project your clients are working on. If you as a translator would like to gain more number of orders of translation, expanding your services in addition to translation can be an effective strategy. We all are linguistic consultants helping clients make their projects successful. This doesn’t mean however that you always have to take care of everything by yourself besides translation. We have peer networks, and we have colleagues we can count on. You receive a linguistic job request that you don’t provide / don’t feel confident? Wait a moment before you just turn it down and think if you know anyone who’s good at it.

Through networking, I’ve met lots of colleagues from a variety of professions & sectors. I proactively collaborate with them in a variety of ways: translation, proofreading, interpreting, linguistic related arrangement, local guide, DTP incl. printouts, subtitling, voiceover etc. I even share workloads with them if a volume is too large and I can’t manage it alone, of course, as long as clients allow me to do so. Eventually, it brings to me more jobs of translation. Here’s a good example: clients who contact me for interpreting need not only an interpreting service but also a translation service at another occasion. If I just decline, they’ll have to go to another service provider and I’ll end up losing subsequent opportunities.

Of course, coordinating a project consumes time, so if you don’t find it worth, that’s okay. There’s yet lots of other ideas you can incorporate. Coordinating is just one of those. I just enjoy such activities as a part of my linguistic services, and it pays to do it. I’ve had an impression that not a small number of translators out of Japan provide not only translation but also interpreting, while especially Japanese translators tend to limit their capability to translation, which is missing wider opportunities. I often make posts in English first followed by Japanese, but I intentionally wrote this post other way around 😉

Pic: a souvenir received from my Singaporean client🇸🇬

It has been super hectic for the last few months: signing a contract for & moving to my new flat, business trips to Osaka and Tokyo, meeting with clients, and translating a variety of documents and arranging interpreting projects in the meantime.

I have stayed in Tokyo for a week to attend a translation industry event as well as an in-person event of my client as a project manager for its interpreting assignment. They were over and I’m on my way back home. The latter gave me a great opportunity and experience to coordinate the project and communicate with a number of stakeholders, including clients, interpreters, and a SI booth setup provider and my colleague who helped me contact the provider. There were many items I went through for the first time in the course of arrangements but now I can manage them with confidence if such projects happen again. I’d like to thank everyone who gave me supports to make the project successful, and I hope to work with them again sometime soon 🙂

Pic: “complimentary” 😂 cake for the successful completion of the project.