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 Words Of Truth And Wisdom: Hobby Or Profession
Written by Alethea and Athena Nibley
We just got back from Anime Detour! Tadah! (Have I used the random “tadah” in this column before? I tend to do it a lot...) I don't think we did enough to justify a full con report in this column, but there was a really good panel we went to that has given us a lot to ramble on that would be appropriate here. It was presented by Evan Miller, a translator for Aurora Publishing and Crunchyroll, and columnist at Anime News Network, and it was called “Hobby or Profession?” It was basically a discussion of whether or not making anime/manga a career is right for you, or if it would be better to keep it as a hobby instead.
The panel focused on various possibilities, like art and maybe other skills that could be useful in anime or manga companies (for example, just about all anime/manga companies have accountants), but since we're translators, I'm just going to focus on that part. And actually, I didn't ask permission to discuss the panel, so mostly I'm just going to talk about our own experiences as to the pros and cons of making translating a career.
To be honest, we love our job so much that we rarely consider the cons, but we have experienced some of them. The main one, of course, would be that it's actually not easy to make a living off of translating alone, especially with the industry the way it is right now. We had been told that the industry is dying since almost before we even got into it, but it has managed to survive thus far (barely), so we think it'll probably be around for a while. Manga is still popular, after all. But right now, it does seem to be in need of some serious life support. Regardless of that, we've found it to be pretty hard to get enough work from any one company. That in itself is a con, and it brings up another con: you have to be brave enough to market yourself, or at least to go to the companies that might be hiring and offer your services. We're both pretty shy, so this was really hard for us, and we went through a long period of poverty before we managed to kick ourselves enough to do it anyway. Fortunately, now that we've done it and it's worked, it's easier to work up the courage to contact more companies when we want to (like if we see a company getting a bunch of titles we want to work on, and think, “We want to work for them!”).
We have reason to believe that not all translation work for anime/manga companies is freelance, but we have yet to experience any in-house positions, so we have reason to believe that it's harder to get those. (Or we're just horrible at finding them.) But the truth is that a lot of companies hire freelancers. Working freelance is super fun, because you can make your own hours. It's like when Shigure shows up in Fruits Basket and says, “Good morning everyone!” and Yuki says, “It's four in the afternoon. Get a normal sleep schedule,” and Shigure says, “I became a novelist so I wouldn't have to.” You don't have to wake up early, and you don't have to go to the office--you don't even have to change out of your pajamas. But it also means that your taxes aren't automatically deducted out of your paycheck, so instead of getting a refund at the end of the year, you pay it all, and sometimes, it's not pretty. Make sure you haven't spent everything as you've gotten it. Also, there are no benefits, like health insurance. So you have to make sure to buy your own.
You have to be able to motivate yourself. It's nearly impossible to make a living doing freelance work if you can't get yourself to put down the video games every once in a while. Or, y'know, more than once in a while, since you'd want to work as much as people with “normal” jobs in order to make a living. That being the case, one of the things Mr. Miller pointed out was that your hobby will become “work.” For us, this is actually a pro. We eat, sleep, and breathe anime and manga, and when we've worked all day on a manga translation, we'll put it down and go read more manga. We think of it as getting paid to do something we're doing all the time anyway. But we also know some people who get tired of doing the same thing all the time, and some people who will immediately think of something as “work” in the hard labor sense as soon as it becomes their official job. In that case, you would definitely want to consider whether or not making your hobby into your job is really right for you.
And wow, it seems like there are a lot more cons than pros in this case. So what it all comes down to is how much you love what you do. If you love anime and manga enough to spend every waking hour on it, all the cons probably won't seem like much. We find that not only the manga we translate, but the translation process itself, is very rewarding. It's really fun to try and come up with just the right combination of words that mean the right thing but also sound like someone would actually say them. It's kind of like putting together a puzzle, and it's good exercise for the brain. I think I've quoted this here before, but someone (we have a planner that attributes it to Confucius) once said something like, “Find something you love doing, find a way to get paid doing it, and you'll never work a day in your life.” So for us, that's the biggest pro of translating manga. We don't work--we just get paid to have fun.
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