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Edited on Thu Jan-17-08 12:04 PM by Lydia Leftcoast
Interpreters are well paid, but it's a high-stress job. I don't interpret, but some translators do, and they all say that they're wiped out at the end of the day.
Interpreters can make a lot of money, but they get more work and money if they have field-specific knowledge. If the people who hire your wife like her work, she may get more assignments. ON EDIT: I noticed that she has an MBA and business skills. This could make her a very valuable interpreter.
Also, if she has good composition skills in Chinese, she could make a decent living as an English-Chinese translator. There's a lot of demand for that now, as more U.S. companies do business with China. They want catalogues, contracts, employee handbooks, business letters, patents, and other documents translated into Chinese.
A (written) translator's income depends on the volume of work. I've been a Japanese-English translator since 1994, and my monthly income has varied from a low of $200 to a high of $8000.
Translators are paid by the word, either by word/character (in East Asian languages) of source text or by word/character of output text. The less common your language is, the more money you can earn per word.
If she's interested in becoming a translator with a sideline of interpreting, she should sign on to the Internet mailing list "Fanyi." I think it's located at the University of Hawaii, but you should be able to find it by googling.
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