Anyway, how do I become a professor at a college? Or a translator/interpreter? What types of college degrees do I need and how to get my foot in the door? Thanks. :)I want to be a foreign language professor at a college or a translator/interpreter. How to do that?
Foreign language classes (i.e. focusing on just the language, not upper-level courses in culture, literature, etc. that may also be taught in the language and required for majors) are usually taught by graduate students (you'd teach while getting your MA and/or PhD) and adjuncts, who work for low pay with no benefits. But here are some options:
1. If you also really like and are good at literary research (writing papers, basically. Do you also get As in English?), you could get your Ph.D. in the language of your choice or comp lit and go for a traditional tenure-track professor job at a university or liberal arts college. Most "language" majors, at the undergrad and especially graduate level, progress from just learning to speak the language to using it to study literature, film, or some aspect of the target culture. Linguistics, whether comparative or based on a single language, is also an option. While a graduate student and again in a professor job, you will be teaching but also doing research, writing a dissertation and then books and articles the rest of your career. If you don't enjoy research, there's little point in spending 6+ years on an academic Ph.D. that may or may not get you the job you want (tenure-track professor jobs are ridiculously competitive). Many with Ph.D.s in languages end up with one of those adjunct jobs for life, or get discouraged after not getting an academic job and do something else.
2. If teaching language is all you want to do, get your BA in the language (preferably with a year abroad) and an MA or, better, Ph.D. focused on foreign language acquisition/pedagogy in that language. There are fewer programs devoted to this than to language-literature, so take care to apply only to graduate programs that really offer what you want. With this kind of degree, you can get a full-time job as a language program director and/or instructor at any kind of institution from high school to major universities to specialized language institutes. They're not usually tenure-track positions (except maybe at community colleges), but they tend to be full-time with benefits.
or 3. Double major in education and your language of choice and just teach high school. MA or M.Ed. optional. If you really only want to teach language, and if the language you want to teach is not something obscure that only elite private high schools would offer, this is probably actually your best bet because the college language teaching market in major languages is oversaturated with Ph.D.s who wanted to become prominent Proust scholars but wound up taking what they could get teaching four sections of beginning French for pennies to make ends meet.
For translation or interpretation, I'd suggest a BA in one or two languages or a language + linguistics and then get a masters in translation/interpretation or go to a shorter training/certification program specific to the kind of translation you'd like to do such as court interpretation or medical translation. In-house (i.e. employed by a company or the government) translator/interpreter jobs can be hard to get, especially since you're competing with people who are bilingual from childhood and may also have work experience in the industry they're translating for, whereas freelance translation is flexible and easier to get but not always steady work. Pay is OK but not great. Probably better off teaching, and then if you wind up in one of these part-time adjunct jobs, you can always do translations on the side.I want to be a foreign language professor at a college or a translator/interpreter. How to do that?
Your best option is to Double Major in two foreign languages at college. A Bachelor's degree in a foreign language is usually enough to work as a court interpreter or with another translation company. If you want to teach at a community college, you will need a Master's degree in the foreign language and if you want to teach at a 4 year university, then you will need a Phd in a foreign language. Anyways, I would Double Major in two languages for your Bachelor's degree. Good luck.I want to be a foreign language professor at a college or a translator/interpreter. How to do that?
You'd need at least a masters in the language to teach it at the college level, and many people applying for those jobs have PhDs - you'll be competing against them, and there's a ton of competition for faculty jobs.
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