Someone who loves to learn new languages and wants to make a career out of it can often end up as a language translator. These linguistic professionals convert information from one language to another so that people can understand the original source in their native language. While working as independent foreign language translators under software development companies, they translate and transcribe important information. Moreover, language translators also interpret administrative hearings, conferences, and meetings.
Normally language translators have a bachelor's degree, but some of them even complete their master's degree before applying for jobs. Commonly, they study Linguistics, English, or Business. Knowledge and understanding of foreign languages, Haitian Creole, translation services, or Hindi can be seen in the resumes of language translators.
Normally, working as a language translator, you can earn around $22 in an hour and make more than $45,000 per year. The career has a good growth rate with more job opportunities in the future.
How to Become a Language Translator
What is a Language Translator
There is more than meets the eye when it comes to being a Language Translator. For example, did you know that they make an average of $27.62 an hour? That's $57,443 a year!
Between 2018 and 2028, the career is expected to grow 19% and produce 14,600 job opportunities across the U.S.
What Does a Language Translator Do
There are certain skills that many Language Translators have in order to accomplish their responsibilities. By taking a look through resumes, we were able to narrow down the most common skills for a person in this position. We discovered that a lot of resumes listed Business skills, Cultural sensitivity and Dexterity.
How To Become a Language Translator
If you're interested in becoming a Language Translator, one of the first things to consider is how much education you need. We've determined that 57.9% of Language Translators have a bachelor's degree. In terms of higher education levels, we found that 15.4% of Language Translators have master's degrees. Even though most Language Translators have a college degree, it's possible to become one with only a high school degree or GED.
Choosing the right major is always an important step when researching how to become a Language Translator. When we researched the most common majors for a Language Translator, we found that they most commonly earn Bachelor's Degree degrees or Master's Degree degrees. Other degrees that we often see on Language Translator resumes include Associate Degree degrees or Diploma degrees.
You may find that experience in other jobs will help you become a Language Translator. In fact, many Language Translator jobs require experience in a role such as Teacher. Meanwhile, many Language Translators also have previous career experience in roles such as Translator or Interpreter And Translator.
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And if you’re looking for a job, here are the five top employers hiring now:
Language Translator Career Paths
In addition to switching up your job search, it might prove helpful to look at a career path for your specific job. Now, what's a career path you ask? Well, it's practically a map that shows how you might advance from one job title to another. Our career paths are especially detailed with salary changes. So, for example, if you started out with the role of Teacher you might progress to a role such as Consultant eventually. Later on in your career, you could end up with the title Managing Partner.
Language Translator Jobs You Might Like
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Average Salary for a Language Translator
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Choose From 10+ Customizable Language Translator Resume templates
Zippia allows you to choose from different easy-to-use Language Translator templates, and provides you with expert advice. Using the templates, you can rest assured that the structure and format of your Language Translator resume is top notch. Choose a template with the colors, fonts & text sizes that are appropriate for your industry.
Language Translator Demographics
Language Translator Gender Distribution
After extensive research and analysis, Zippia's data science team found that:
- Among Language Translators, 60.6% of them are women, while 39.4% are men.
- The most common race/ethnicity among Language Translators is White, which makes up 46.2% of all Language Translators.
- The most common foreign language among Language Translators is Spanish at 33.1%.
Find the best Language Translator job for you
Language Translator Jobs You Might Like
- High Paying Language Translator Jobs - $91K and Up
- Entry Level Language Translator Jobs
- Part Time Language Translator Jobs
- Actively Hiring
- No Degree Language Translator Jobs
Top Colleges for Language Translators
1. Harvard University
Cambridge, MA • Private
2. University of California - Los Angeles
Los Angeles, CA • Private
3. University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, CA • Private
4. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill, NC • Private
5. Stanford University
Stanford, CA • Private
6. Northwestern University
Evanston, IL • Private
7. University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA • Private
8. University of Texas at Austin
Austin, TX • Private
9. Columbia University in the City of New York
New York, NY • Private
10. University of Michigan - Ann Arbor
Ann Arbor, MI • Private
Find the best Language Translator job for you
Language Translator Jobs You Might Like
- High Paying Language Translator Jobs - $91K and Up
- Entry Level Language Translator Jobs
- Part Time Language Translator Jobs
- Actively Hiring
- No Degree Language Translator Jobs
Online Courses For Language Translator That You May Like
Welcome to the CLICS-Machine Translation MOOC This MOOC explains the basic principles of machine translation. Machine translation is the task of translating from one natural language to another natural language. Therefore, these algorithms can help people communicate in different languages. Such algorithms are used in common applications, from Google Translate to apps on your mobile device. After taking this course you will be able to understand the main difficulties of translating natural langu...
Professional translation is a complex process that usually involves collaboration of multiple people. The course will show you how to build this process correctly: analyze content, determine requirements and risks, select appropriate jobs and vendors, evaluate translation quality. You will know why user manuals should not be translated in the same way as you would translate promotional or legal documents. You will see why every content type requires a special translation approach and learn to pr...
This course offers you basic but valuable techniques used by a good translator in the translation between English and Chinese. We'll discuss what is translation, what is good translation, and learn about how to produce good translations. All the examples used in this course are taken from the course instructor's own translations of various genres and topics of writing. These examples are elaborated on to show you how to understand the idea, style and tone of the writer, the historical and cultur...
Top Skills For a Language Translator
The skills section on your resume can be almost as important as the experience section, so you want it to be an accurate portrayal of what you can do. Luckily, we've found all of the skills you'll need so even if you don't have these skills yet, you know what you need to work on. Out of all the resumes we looked through, 21.8% of Language Translators listed Foreign Language on their resume, but soft skills such as Business skills and Cultural sensitivity are important as well.
Best States For a Language Translator
Some places are better than others when it comes to starting a career as a Language Translator. The best states for people in this position are New York, Virginia, California, and Massachusetts. Language Translators make the most in New York with an average salary of $72,928. Whereas in Virginia and California, they would average $65,309 and $63,472, respectively. While Language Translators would only make an average of $62,744 in Massachusetts, you would still make more there than in the rest of the country. We determined these as the best states based on job availability and pay. By finding the median salary, cost of living, and using the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Location Quotient, we narrowed down our list of states to these four.
1. West Virginia
$59,771
Avg. Salary
2. Virginia
$65,309
Avg. Salary
3. New Mexico
$61,415
Avg. Salary