It takes an analytical mind, to zero in and get the exact meaning every time. He translates texts ranging from immigration documents to patents to software users' guides. Morry Sofer puts a finer point on it. According to Sofer, medicine, engineering, finance, legal, technology and Web-site localization are all good areas of specialization. In the United States, languages offering the highest volume of translation work are Chinese, French, German, Japanese and Spanish.
Many translators truly lead the life of the free agent, even though they get work through agencies.
He's on the short list of a couple of dozen agencies whose varied customers require translations between Korean and English from time to time. Two technologies have begun to change the translation industry. Machine translation, the holy grail of engineers who work with human languages, is now cheap and widely available. But in many cases, these totally automated translations are of mediocre to poor quality. So human translators will not become obsolete anytime too soon.