Hi,
I’m a freelance translator ( EN-ESP-Dutch > FR) and I want a career change and I’m interested to learn web development but I have no idea where to begin and I wanted to ask to this community what kind of job a translator can do if he learns web development, my idea is to mix both translation and web development, I was thinking software translation or creation and translation of websites, but I’m pretty sure there are a lot of other opportunities. Thank you.
1 Like
Hello, and welcome to the forums!
I’m by no means an expert in this, so hopefully someone much more knowledgeable can chime in.
Maybe something here will at least provide some keywords for further research.
I think there are a lot of opportunities for internationalization and localization in development. You’ll commonly see this abbreviated as i18n (i with 18 letters then n for "internationalization "), which is also a good search term to find more resources. There are a number of projects and APIs centered around this, such as those listed here: Internationalization (i18n) open source libraries and APIs. There are specialized i18n libraries for many of the frameworks as well. I imagine becoming experienced with this important side of development would be valuable.
3 Likes
Nice to see more language-oriented people getting into coding! Recently, I’ve been very interested in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and how it connects to machine translation and so on. I also find that knowing a bit about web design/development can help when doing translations for webpages, if changing the language changes the layout or makes things unclear.
On the more language-focused side of things, I have been interested to find that technical translators–that is, people with knowledge in an area who can then accurately translate specialized vocab and topics–are very high in demand around the world. It also turns out that programming around the world still uses the same English-based commands and syntax, so I have started a series of “Programming Terms for ESL Learners” series for kids that I teach who are interested in programming, but less in English. Seeing how knowing English can help them with their future dreams helps them with motivation, and it’s always fun to show how webpages are formatted with human body parts that they already know!
I am always intrigued by cross-industry work, so I’ll be interested to see what you (and I, for that matter) end up doing!
1 Like