Where do translation students go? A study of the employment and mobility of Master graduates

ABSTRACT

Faced with technological disruption, the employability of translation graduates demands careful analysis. Interpretations of major previous surveys suggest that only about one third of graduates find employment as translators or interpreters, although about half of them tend to find employment using multilingual communication skills in various capacities. This reality check has major implications for any attempt to adjust training programmes to the demands of translation companies: it becomes very important to assess the wider range of jobs and the transferable skills that they require. A survey of graduates from the Chinese-English Master of Translation at the University of Melbourne offers detailed insight into the wider range of employment but differs from previous surveys in two respects. First, the international mobility of students means that multiple national differences have to be taken into account. And second, the 20% of graduates that undertook further study after the Master justifies part of the training being to meet the criteria of academic institutions. These two aspects may be generalisable to other training programmes and should help revise the way curricula are conceptualised.

KEYWORDS:

• Translator training
• graduate employability
• mobility
• Chinese-English translation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Our sincere thanks to Daniel Toudic for providing the report delivered to the EMT Network Meeting, Brussels 31 March 2017 and to Andrew Rothwell for provided the data extracted for his students in the United Kingdom, which has enabled us to follow the exact questions asked.

2. More detailed data on the 29 graduates from Swansea University in the sample (personal communication from Andrew Rothwell, 29 February 2020) help us understand some of the difficulties in interpreting the results. The Swansea results indicate that 67% of all the jobs obtained by the graduates were ‘translation-related’, which is a very high percentage. However, since one graduate had had more than five jobs, one suspects there might be different understandings of the word ‘job’: it could mean an ongoing contract or a one-off translation commission. The survey then indicates that 44.83% of the graduates work in ‘language services (translation, localisation, interpreting, language training, etc.)’, where ‘language training’ is somehow different from ‘education (language teaching in schools/universities)’, which is offered as a different option – but did everyone understand that? Then we see that just 27.59% of the graduates (eight respondents) say that ‘translator’ is the job title that best describes their current position. To this we might add the one project manager and perhaps the one translation tools manager, bringing the percentage up to 34.48%, which is what we might have expected.

3. If 30.57% sounds too low for the prestigious institutions, we could place the 860 translators or interpreters in the context of the 1,944 graduates who responded to the question ‘Is your work language related?’. This makes the percentage of translators/interpreters 44.23%. The problem is then what one does with the 869 graduates who did not answer that question. As Pokorn (2016, 668) notes with respect a similar survey carried out in Ljubljana (not the CIUTI survey), if a survey is not obligatory ‘very few graduates (in our case only 25 of them) decide to respond to it. Moreover, it seems that only those graduates who feel confident about their position are willing to answer and provide additional data on their further career.’

4. Our thanks to Gary Massey, Director of the Institute of Translation and Interpreting, for sending the data from the surveys.

5. Ethics clearance was received from the Human Research Ethics Committees, Faculty of Arts, University of Melbourne (Ethics Authorisation Number 1954388.1).

6. In Schmitt, Gernstmeyer, and Müller (2014) 1,278 graduates said they have a job that is ‘translation and interpreting-related’, of which 860 say their main job is as a translator or interpreter. This means that 418 graduates (32.7%) are in ‘related’ fields but are not mainly translators or interpreters.

7. In the EMT survey (Toudic 2017b), we take the 1,722 graduates who indicated their ‘employment sector’, of whom 1,138 worked in ‘education’ or ‘language services (translation, localization …)’. Of the latter 1,138 graduates, 558 worked as translators, project managers, localisers or translation-tool managers. This means that 580 (33.68% of the 1,722 graduates) worked in language/education fields other than translation.

8. Here the term ‘language worker’ refers to a person who is employed with non-translation occupations requiring language skills.

9. This degree of multiple jobholding appears to be much less than that reported in Katan’s 2008 survey of 890 translators and interpreters (reported in Katan 2009), where some 69% of the respondents had a second role.

10. The comparable numbers here vary considerably. Pym et al. (2012) found that 74% of translators work freelance and about 60% work part-time. In the CIUTI survey (Schmitt, Gernstmeyer, and Müller 2014), 64% of those in the translation industry report working as freelancers. In the EMT survey (Toudic 2017b), 25% of the respondents report being self-employed.

11. It is important to note that 55% of the language-service providers in China are in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangdong (China Academy of Translation, and Translators Association of China 2018), which means that seeking permanent work in one’s hometown is unlikely to mean finding full-time in-house employment with these companies.

12. There might be a certain nation-based presupposition at work when, for example, the previous surveys assess the unemployment rates of graduates in terms of the unemployment rates in the countries in which the training programs are located (Schmitt, Gernstmeyer, and Müller 2016, 60; Pokorn 2016, 669).

13. We note that in June 2019 China had 369,935 registered companies with language services, and just 9,734 companies with language service as the main business (China Academy of Translation and Translators Association of China 2019).

14. There seems to be no easy way to define the range of occupations where translation skills may be of use. Bond (2018) scoured LinkedIn for the job titles of people who work for language service providers, coming up with over 600 different titles, many of which do not include the word ‘translation’. The advantage of a bottom-up approach based on real graduate employment is that we are forced to work with the actual job titles, rather than suppositions about where translation becomes something else.