1. Main Website
2. For Translators
3. Presentations & Publications
4. Getting from Tier Two to Tier One in Japanese-to-English Translation

Presentations & PublicationsGetting from Tier Two to Tier One in Japanese to English TranslationAdvice not useful to any but a tiny group of translators

by William Lise

(June 30, 2019; restored from Lise's personal website on October 14, 2023 ahead of the trashing of that domain and website.)

Although very few JA-EN translators—particularly native English-speaking translators living in Japan—will be able to migrate to tier one to survive AI, and the vast majority remaining on tier two will find that tier two is populated almost entirely by people who can only receive post-editing work from their clients, I thought it appropriate to keep this content.

The above said, the need to survive the shift to post-editing increases the relevance of my IJET-30 presentation, but only for a tiny subset of the translator population.

I had previously uploaded my 2019 presentation at IJET-30 in Cairns, the last IJET Conference before the Covid-19 pandemic struck.

Hindsight is 20-20. The adoption of the MTPE business model by the larger agencies that control almost all the JA-EN work will mean serious trouble for agency-dependent freelancers. As of this writing, the author personally knows of colleagues who have left, not able to make a living from post-editing work.

This presentation was migrated to Lise's personal website sometime back, but with that website set for deletion, it has been put back here for the probably small number of translators who can make use of the suggestions made.