Does it pay well? And what kind of demand is there for it?
Specifically German and maybe Japanese are what I'm wondering about.
Maybe working as an interpreter in business/political relations, or just translating movies and shit. What's it pay?
if money is the most important thing in your life you fail
>>1
I've been paid to translate on a number of occasions. It can pay pretty well, but it's hard to make a full-time living at it.
The biggest challenge is that almost all professional translators are freelancers--it's virtually impossible to get a full-time, salaried job as a translator. So you've got to be ready to hustle to keep your pipeline full and the income coming in. If you're not comfortable networking and selling yourself (figuratively), expect to struggle, particularly if you're working with languages as common as Japanese or German. There's a shitload of competition in those.
Google "translation house" and send your resume and some samples to every company that comes up--you can be added to their freelance roster and they'll send you occasional gigs. There are also a number of online forums, including proz.com, that cater to the needs of freelance language specialists.
Interpreting is a very different skill set, and one that's easier to get full-time work in--legal interpreting is particularly valuable and well paid (in courtrooms, etc.). But those gigs are very hard to get if you're not a native bilingual. If you're not completely, native-level fluent in the language you're translating from, you're virtually out of luck.
Good luck!
I heard that at least in Germany, translating one page of German text into Japanese, Chinese or Korean pays the same for a freelancer as translating it into English. I find this highly unfair.
>>I heard that at least in Germany, translating one page of German text into Japanese, Chinese or Korean pays the same for a freelancer as translating it into English. I find this highly unfair.
Because German and English are similar, while German and JCK languages are not, or because you consider Japanese, Chinese, and Korean more difficult?
I think it makes sense--the best translators are almost always native speakers of target languages, so the relative difficulty of each translation task (translating from a language you've learned into your native language, in almost all cases) should be similar. I do know that in the States, people who translate less common languages sometimes charge a little more. But all the languages you've mentioned, with the possible exception of Korean, are fairly commonly studied, so it's not as if any of the languages are especially rare.