Is it worthwhile to go to graduate school for translation or interpreting? Does it depend on whether you want to study translation, interpreting, or both? Does it depend on your location? Age? Language pair? Now that I’ve finished my conference interpreting Master’s degree, I thought I’d revisit this topic with some new information. For background, I had a Bachelor’s in French and English (from 1993; so long ago that only a paper version of my transcript exists!), and a Master’s in French Literature, but I did not have a T&I-specific graduate degree until this year, when I did the Glendon College/York University Master’s in Conference Interpreting program. More on that here, and here.

Most importantly, you’re not too old

Let’s get one factor out of the way. If your brain still works, you’re not too old. There goes one excuse! I started my MCI at age 48, and you can read this guest post by Joseph Welch, who went back to graduate school for translation at age 63. In my MCI program, I’m not sure there was anyone who entered the program directly from undergrad, and there were several people around my age and older. So, scratch age off the list.

Was it worth it for me?

For my purposes, absolutely, yes, doing the Glendon MCI was worth it, for the following reasons:

• I think that conference interpreting is one of those areas where the degree makes a difference; it’s true that there are successful conference interpreters who don’t have an MCI, but I think it’s more the norm than it is in translation.
• It’s also true that you could improve your interpreting skills a lot simply by practicing for hours and hours a day, as you are forced to do in an MCI program. But honestly, very few people have the time and discipline to do that. I’m a pretty disciplined person and I wouldn’t have been able to do that, plus you would get no feedback from someone who actually knows what they’re doing.
• The Glendon program was pretty perfect for me. I wanted a practical (rather than theoretical) program, and all of the Glendon instructors are practicing interpreters, so it really fulfilled my personal goals. The pandemic offered the opportunity to do the program entirely online, and it was very affordable (around US $19,000) by US standards.
• I felt that (and this is more about my own imposter syndrome than anything else, but it was a factor) I would never have the confidence to dive into the conference interpreting world without a full Master’s in conference interpreting. Again, this more about me than anything else, but I didn’t want to be looking for conference interpreting work and saying, “I have my court certification, then I took these other classes, then I did an internship.” I just wanted to be able to say, “I have my Master’s in Conference Interpreting from…”

What’s your “why”?

If you’re considering a T&I graduate degree, I think the first step is to ask yourself why you’re considering doing this, because it’s a big investment of time and money. Also, in my experience (which admittedly is not universal), T&I falls in a bit of a weird grey area where you generally pay the tuition yourself because there are not things like teaching assistantships or graduate stipends (unlike programs in the Humanities where you’re unlikely to be paying full freight yourself), but you aren’t going to have multiple six-figure job offers waiting for you when you graduate (unlike something like medical school, where it’s clearly worth taking student loans).

Glendon does their tuition in three payments, fall, winter, and spring, so I was able to just pay the tuition in cash by economizing on other expenses. Personal opinion, I did not want to do a program that involved student loans (I hate debt), and I believe that Glendon is the least expensive AIIC-endorsed program, at least in North America.

My “why” was pretty tangible: because I will never have the confidence to do this until/unless I dedicate myself to studying it for a whole year and pass a really hard set of exams proving that I can do this. For me, the path to an MCI was pretty clear.

However, I don’t know that the decision is that clear for everyone. I honestly don’t know that freelance translators with a T&I Master’s make more money than people without one, or are more in demand. I’m not saying that they don’t make more money or aren’t more in demand, but I don’t know that it’s a significant difference.

I also feel that T&I programs, by definition, are there to teach you to translate and/or interpret. That might seem obvious, but here’s what I mean: they don’t generally teach you to run a freelance business, which is a huge part of the equation. In my program at Glendon, we got some very good advice about the interpreting market, and we all did presentations about the interpreting market in our various regions of the world. This is probably more than many T&I programs include, and I think it’s still a long road to launching and running a successful freelance business if you’ve never done it before.

Realistically, there just aren’t that many options for people who live in North America and want to find an in-house job as a translator or interpreter. People with a Master’s from a reputable school probably have a leg up on the few in-house jobs that do exist, but it’s just not a realistic expectation that you will finish a T&I graduate degree and have multiple — or perhaps any — in-house job offers waiting for you. In my experience, most people who fail as freelance translators or interpreters do so not because of the language aspects of the work, but because they can’t force themselves to market aggressively enough to find good clients, or they can’t manage the clients they do find, or they just don’t have the discipline to be productive without a boss. And a T&I program is not going to help you with any of that.

All this to say, make sure you have a specific goal in mind before you select and apply to a program.

Consider all options

If you’re considering a T&I Master’s, make sure that you put all options on the table. Here’s where age, and perhaps more correctly, stage of life do enter into it. For me, “all options” meant the four AIIC-endorsed MCI programs in North America that offer French (MIIS, U. Maryland, U. Ottawa, and Glendon), because I am just not in a position to move to another country by myself, and I couldn’t find any international universities offering online programs.

However, if you’re in a more portable phase of life, I would definitely look at international programs, not least of all because your language skills will improve a lot from living in one of your source language countries. Programs outside the US tend to be a lot less expensive in terms of tuition, but this can be offset by the higher cost of living in a large city, particularly in Europe. This was my experience when I looked at the programs in Geneva and Paris: tuition, very affordable; cost of living in those cities, not so affordable.

What about online programs?

Having done a fully online program, I can say that a) of course I would have loved to be there in person, and b) the online program was a lot more doable financially and logistically. I think that’s probably true of any fully online program. Glendon has always done Year 1 of their program online, so they had the online course system very well organized. I wish we had been able to go interpret in the lab and theater that Glendon has, but that also would have added a layer of expense and logistics that I was glad not to have to deal with. Personally I felt that I got a lot out of the online program, but I also made a huge commitment to attending every class and practice session, interpreting for lots of live events at York University, etc. which made a big difference.

Readers, any other thoughts on T&I graduate programs?

Over the past year, I’ve gone through an interesting unscientific experiment in work/life balance: nine months in which almost every waking moment was consumed with work or school due to my conference interpreting graduate program, (during which I continued working part-time), and then two months of a pretty laid-back schedule while I waited for my interpreting exit exam results and took some vacation.

I live in Boulder, Colorado, sort of a work/life balance laboratory: we’re sometimes classified as both the best-educated small metro area in the US, and as the fittest city in the US. Whether you want to call that work/life balance or “work hard/play hard,” it makes for an interesting environment. When my family relocated here from Boston 18 years ago, I had to train myself to ask, “What are your interests?” or “What do you like to do in life?” as an icebreaker cocktail party question, rather than, “What do you do for work?” because many people are more defined by their non-work interests than by their careers.

Surviving a year with no work/life balance

During my grad school year, my sanity strategy was simply to accept the lack of balance and do what I could to cope with it. Most days I would arrive at my office in time for an 8 AM class (meaning I got up around 6:30), stay at the office for class and work until around 6 PM with maybe a 30 minute break in the middle of the day, then put in at least an hour of studying or working after dinner. I made a point of taking at least one full day a week off; on “screen-free Saturdays,” my husband and I went mountain biking, hiking, or skiing for most of the day. But I often put in three to five hours of school or work time on Sundays. I’d estimate that I probably allocated at least 55 hours to school and work in a typical week. Some coping strategies that really helped me:

• Meditating. I’ve mediated for 10-15 minutes pretty much every weekday since December, and it’s made a huge difference in my ability to cope with stress.
• Admitting defeat in certain areas. I like to eat real food for lunch, and I started out with an ambitious idea that on Sunday nights, I was going to make large batches of a couple of different dishes and then pre-pack my lunches for the week. Dream on! That happened maybe twice, and the other alternative was spending way too much money (since I paid my grad school tuition in cash and was working less) on eating out. So I compromised on prepared food. I became good friends with Tasty Bite pre-made curries and precooked rice, and I’m not sure I will ever be able to consume Madras Lentils without thinking back on my pandemic grad school year.
• Giving myself total veg-out time. I’m not much of a veg-out person. I always say that one thing I’m terrible at is doing nothing. But this year, I found that sometimes I just needed to lay in our backyard hammock and listen to podcasts for three hours on a Sunday afternoon, or allocate part of the weekend as simply “recharge time” where I didn’t have any particular plans.

Now that I’m out the other side

A few observations from the other side of a year with pretty much no work/life balance. After I took my Master’s exams at the beginning of June, I forced myself to slow down significantly. After several months of doing interpreting practice multiple hours a day, I told myself that it was OK to take a break until I received my exam results (a month later). I also planned a two-week trip to Europe where the only work I did was to periodically check e-mail, so in total I had the better part of six weeks with very little stress. I did a bunch of translation work in June, but I haven’t worked in the evenings or on weekends since May, and I’ve been working more like 35 hours a week rather than 55. A few thoughts on that:

• Particularly in the US, I just think that a lot of us are simply trying to put 10 pounds of flour in a five-pound bag, as my grandmother used to say. We think that the work/life balance problem is us: we have poor time management skills, we don’t plan ahead enough, we need too much downtime. When in reality, we’re just trying to do too much, and particularly trying to work too much.
• You can’t do multiple things full-time and be good at all of them. You just can’t. Now that I’m also out the other side of parenting (of course “mom” will always be my favorite job, but now that my daughter is almost 19 and living on her own, the day-to-day work has slowed down a lot!), I can see that lots of freelancing parents are really asking, “How can I work 12 hours a day and still be there for every moment of my kids’ lives?” You can’t. You just simply cannot. And trying to do that is a recipe for exhaustion, feeling like a failure, and not doing a good job either at work or at home.
• Sometimes the answer is simply to work less. By many measures, the US is the most overworked developed country in the world. I personally find that when “life” builds up, I start to feel stressed at work as well. The house is a mess, the laundry is overflowing, there’s no food in the fridge, the car needs an oil change, we need to get estimates on a new roof, etc. etc. etc. and all of a sudden I’m having a hard time concentrating at work. The answer, for me at least, is to take some time off work to manage those things so that they don’t get out of control in the first place, which means working less.
• Weirdly enough, I think that one of the biggest keys to work/life balance as a freelancer is to be honest with yourself about how much you need to charge in order to meet your financial goals, then assertively market to clients who will pay those rates. One of the most common work/life balance laments I hear from freelancers is, “I know I’m burning out and I would love to work less, but I can’t afford to.” For many people in that category, I think that the problem is often one of two things: a) denial/lack of knowledge about how much they need to earn as a freelancer in order to meet their financial goals, or b) sticking with clients that don’t pay enough to meet their financial goals.

My pandemic grad school year taught me a couple of things: it’s possible to survive a defined period of time with very little work/life balance, and in order to get your work/life balance back, you probably don’t need to streamline, you just need to work less! Readers, any thoughts on this?