I checked into a position with my company’s call center a couple of years ago and there was a pay differential for bilingual CSRs, although I no longer recall how much. In my current position, there’s no differential, but chances for advancement through some of our global operations is greater for fluency in certain languages.
I’ve obtained employment or advanced in past jobs by virtue of speaking Spanish.
[Raises hand sheepishly]
It’s actually gotten to the point where I translate exclusively from Hebrew to English - English-to-Hebrew translators are a dime a dozen, making the ability to translate the other way is much rarer, and thus more lucrative.
For all my jobs in Montreal, I pretty much had to be bilingual (English/French). In my experience, it’s hard to get hired in a working-with-the-public kind of job if you don’t speak at least enough of both languages to get by.
Here, nobody cares that I speak French. Except my sister-in-law, who thinks it’s “swishy and cute”. But she doesn’t pay me.
So no, never had any sort of bonus for the extra language.
I actually know a couple of Canadians like that: Two of my cousins who spent their childhood in Montreal (now they live in Ottawa). Father (my uncle) was English-speaking, mother is a Quebecoise. The kids grew up speaking both languages; they are fluently and utterly bilingual.
However, they aren’t translators. One is a nurse, the other works for the Canadian government in some sort of international trade office. He has to travel to Europe often.
Why is it that one cannot do both? If one is a native English speaker and fairly fluent in French, would that person translate English to French or French to English?
I’m not a professional translator, but my understanding is that, normally, you translate into your native language - if you’re translating into a language you learnt, there are nuances and the like that you can sometimes miss. If you’re brought up bilingual, you can translate either way, though I suspect even then, most people tend to pick one to work in.
Yeah, I agree. I could easily translate something from Bulgarian to English, but the other way would be…well, it would certainly make sense, but it wouldn’t flow perfectly. Certainly no one would want to *pay *me to do this.
I’ve read fanfiction written by people who seem to speak English fluently but aren’t native speakers and it’s very noticeable. There are tiny misuses of idioms, there are inconsistent uses of American and British English (maybe the writer was taught British English in the classroom, but picked up Americanisms from TV; the result can be distracting), weird turns of phrases, etc.
Out of curiosity, did you notice it was my case?
Well, I’ve never read anything particularly long by you. It usually takes something long to notice, if someone’s grasp of the language is generally good, because these things can be quite small, and it can take a few glitches to realize that there is a pattern. For instance, I read a fic last night that included the phrase “he was at the end of his wit”. Now, if everything else in the fic had been in fine, idiomatic English, I might not have even noticed, and if it had been in a short comment, it might have looked like a cutesy affectation. As it was, however, the fic was chock full of rather weird English (notably that there weren’t enough contractions - too many "I am"s and "he is"s where a native English speaker would probably say “I’m” and “he’s”), so this was just another sign that the writer wasn’t a native speaker. Nevertheless, she managed to write a 20,000+ word story in English that had a coherent beginning, middle, and end, so I think I can safely say that she’s a fluent speaker of English. But I still wouldn’t want to pay her to translate something from whatever her native language is into English.
If you want to send me something longer and see if I can pick out what marks you as a non-native speaker, PM me. The fact that I already know that you aren’t, and that I know your native language is French (my best friend is French and I’m accustomed to making allowances for odd little Frenchisms that sneak into her English), could affect my judgment, though.
Sort of. We have recruiters who have to travel so one of the job requirements is bilingualism.
Oh, and I’m unemployed right now (cries) but pretty much every job I’ve applied for requires at least proficiency in some other language. Sadly, no one gives a shit that I speak Bulgarian, or I would be in.
Being bilingual has only resulted in more work for me. It’s gotten to the point where I’d rather conceal the fact than take any pride in it.
I worked at a hotel where they paid the front desk clerks an extra dollar an hour if they spoke another language fluently (read/write). They had to take a test to qualify.
Funny the would pay for whatever language you spoke. We had one lady speak fluent Bulgarian. She NEVER had any cause to translate or whatever. It was a hotel by O’Hare (Chicago) Airport, so the French and German and of course Spanish got used a lot and the Japanese was also used a few times a month.
Someone in my village in Bulgaria once told me brightly that when I got back to America, I could get a job teaching Bulgarian!
I managed not to laugh in her face.
Similarly, I was once being the outside reviewer of an article for a law journal. Since it was a blind review, I wasn’t told who the author was, nor given any identifying information. It was very well written, but I guessed from certain turns of phrase that the author was a francophone. The journal accepted the paper for publication, and when it came out, I found that I had been correct.
Nothing wrong with the author’s English in that case - just certain phrases that sounded to me like a French phrase in English.
For starters, because many agencies have the notion that you must translate into your mother’s tongue. This led to a lot of heated debate in class (I’m wrapping up a Master’s in Translation): my mother’s tongue is not my native tongue, but any agency would be happy to accept either one as my “tongue Nava can translate to”, whereas they wouldn’t want to let me translate into English as it’s “not my first language”, although my English is better than my Catalan (mother’s tongue). We had a Hungarian student say “why did you accept me into the program then? You do not offer Hungarian! I’m translating between English and German in both directions and neither one is my first language!”
There was an article recently, I’ll try to remember to get the reference (I have it at home), where someone set out to determine whether it really makes a difference to be translating into or out of your first language. He worked with translators A->B and B->A, always working in pairs (one translator, one corrector); thus, there were samples translated from first language to second for both members of the pair, from second to first for both, 2nd to 1st for translator and the opposite for the corrector, 1st to 2nd for the translator and the opposite for the corrector. Then the quality of the translations was evaluated by people who didn’t know the language(s) of the translators involved.
His conclusion: it’s best if the two members of the pair have different first languages. It doesn’t matter if the person working into his native language is the translator or the corrector, but it’s best if one person works into and the other one out of his native language.
Some of my teachers went into fits every time I trotted out this article 
FWIW, I’ve seen a lot of “bad turns of phrase” in translations performed by people working into their native language. In Spanish I attribute this mostly to the emphasis of Legal Translations on literality: translators who have been trained to be “as literal as possible” can’t bring themselves to break that literality, so they translate expressions word by word, do not reorder sentences, etc. A Traducción Jurada is required to be literal: it is not required to be meaningful.
Those restrictions melt away suddenly when you point out that your speciality is Technical (non-Legal) Texts.
I’m currently self-employed as a translator (multiple languages required) and a consultant (multiple languages not required but they determine elegibility, I’ve had several jobs where English was a requirement). The client I’m working for as a consultant doesn’t pay any kind of bonuses for languages, but they do pay for language classes in the Official School of Languages and there are positions for which multilingualism is a requirement.
Even my pidgin Japanese is apparently good enough to impress the Japanese clients I worked for last year. They’ve asked me back this year.