Remote English to Japanese Terminologist

Summary

Join us as a terminologist for proper name localization research, evaluation, and management. This freelance remote position requires strong English-Japanese language skills, experience in localization and terminology management, and attention to detail.

Requirements

• Bilingual proficiency: Strong command of English (source language) and Japanese (target language), with deep cultural knowledge and linguistic nuance
• Experience: 3+ years in localization, terminology management, or related fields. Knowledge of shows and films based on books, web comics, and games is preferred
• Terminology management: Experience in managing glossaries and term bases, with a focus on maintaining consistency across projects is a plus
• Research skills: Proven ability to thoroughly research and verify term translations using multiple sources, including fan communities and official databases
• Attention to detail: High level of accuracy and thoroughness in checking term consistency, ensuring error-free results
• Interest in pop culture: A genuine passion for pop culture, including a deep understanding of trends and fan communities, to ensure culturally relevant and engaging term translations
• Collaboration: Skilled in working with phoneticians and copywriters to deliver accurate and creative term solutions across teams
• Problem solving: Adaptable and creative, capable of making informed decisions on transcreation and localization challenges
• Quality assurance: Strong experience in performing quality checks to ensure linguistic accuracy and alignment with the original IP
• Time management: Able to meet tight deadlines in fast-paced environments, delivering high-quality work on time

Responsibilities

• Proper name localization research
• Research and localize proper names into Japanese by finding existing translations for proper names in books, web comics, and games that shows and films are based on
• Proper name localization evaluation
• Evaluate existing localizations of proper names to select the most suitable options based on supporting evidence and consistency with a specific tone and register
• Phonetic transliterations of proper names
• Develop accurate phonetic transliterations for proper names by collaborating with phoneticians and leveraging social media trend metrics and advanced language models (We will train you in using social media metrics analytics and language models for proper name selection)
• Semantic translations of proper names
• When required, produce semantic translations for proper names (program names, book titles, etc.)
• Glossary management
• Maintain a detailed glossary of terms, including their metadata (definitions, usage examples, genre context, categorizations by client, conceptual hierarchy, and subject matter). Ensure consistency across projects and make updates as needed
• Collaboration with phoneticians and copywriters
• Work closely with phoneticians to ensure accurate transliterations and collaborate with copywriters for transcreation efforts, especially in genres that require engaging and audience-appropriate proper name translations
• Collaboration with AI/Neural Machine Translation research engineering team
• Provide evaluation data of proper name localizations for cross-lingual mapping precision for the AI/NMT research engineering team to finetune the relevant language models and evaluate their performance
• Quality assurance
• Review and verify the accuracy of all proper names, ensuring error-free and culturally relevant translations before submission
• Knowledge sharing
• Look for ways to improve the internal terminology management system, continuously updating glossaries and workflows for each content universe and/or domain