This week we have a recently hired new executive of an American subsidiary company visiting for meetings. He was hired from another big manufacturing company, and he’s meeting with everyone to give and get feedback about how things are going overall with the company.
Apparently he doesn’t speak Japanese.
This is good news – we need more non-Japanese in higher level roles in this company, but already even to me the stress of this change is becoming clear. People I almost never talk to ask me to check the English of their documents before meeting with him. My own department head asked me to translate a meeting agenda completely from Japanese to English. Suddenly people who usually don’t use English are having to work with it, and that is causing some concern.
We have a translator on staff here at the factory – an American guy like me who is really friendly and whose full time job is translation. Unfortunately he is close to retirement and may be heading for the door soon.
That will leave just me as a native English speaker, but there are a few people with English as a second language who could step in and translate as necessary.
I’m really hoping that I don’t catch much more translation work. The good point about translation is that you can work at your own pace (usually) and that there is a clear start and end point to your work. The bad point (for me, at least) is that it just isn’t that interesting. I like teaching English, my experience is with language teaching, and my master’s degree is in language teaching and learning.
Once our translator retires, though, it’ll be interesting to see if they start looking to push me into the role.
