Get Ahead as a Writer by Learning Another Language!

A few months ago, I hopped on a plane to Chongqing, China, to have a look at a gigantic 20-ton recycling machine an industrial customer had spotted on the Internet. The vendor in Chongqing and I spoke in Chinese together to inspect the machine's performance. After successfully testing the machine, I placed an order on my customer's behalf and some weeks later it arrived in a large Midwestern factory. Because the Chinese user manual was sparse on details, I put the machine through its paces once again and began writing an English-language manual based on the machine's real-world performance. When I finished this project, I billed for it and received several referrals for new prospects doing similar work.

As fate would have it, a few months later I accepted work to write full-time for a medical devices manufacturer. While done mostly in English, my first project involved communication on the phone in German with some engineers in Austria. While I didn't get to do any travel, the project went much more smoothly than anticipated and closed successfully.

For my second project, a few weeks ago I was on a plane bound for Shenzhen (southern China) to observe and document a chemical analyzer that will appear in hospitals all around the world within a few years. Based on the preliminary notes I took, I will soon begin writing the documentation on this machine also. I have been assigned to work part-time on a third project, whose development is taking place in - you guessed it - China.

My name is John. I am a writer (albeit a technical writer), and I travel internationally as a writer because I speak, read and write more than one language.

If you're a writer, you can do this, too...

MAKE A LIVING AS A WRITER?

So how does a writer - a craftsman of a traditionally poor and pitifully unrecognized trade - make a living jet-setting around the world and get paid for all this?

While there is a combination of factors that have led me to the path whereon I tread now, I can easily say the one factor that has given the biggest boost to my career as a writer has been the study of another language.

Or languages...

THIS WRITER'S STORY

It helps to be born into other languages. But some folks aren't so fortunate for such an introduction.

As a son of a Mexican father, I spoke some Spanish, but spoke mostly English in grade school where old-era conservativism swept away the prospect of foreign language study. In spite of speaking Spanish as a youngster for only a few years, this planted the seeds of a life-long interest in other languages and cultures that live to this day.

That was back then - but luckily the winds of globalization began to waft in a few years later.

GERMAN FIGHTER PLANES

In high school I chose to learn German not to please my schoolmasters, but because I repaired Allied and Axis WWII fighter planes as a weekend warrior-mechanic with the Confederate Air Force. Working on these aircraft and other machines gave me a solid foundation in comprehending mechanical systems - and this would later help my technical writing significantly.

While I worked mostly on American bomber planes, I had the good fortune to work on a few German fighters also. To better enable myself at fixing these other-worldly machines, I was compelled to study German so that I could read their cryptic maintenance manuals.

This was in high school.

GERMAN IN COLLEGE

Later, as a university student of Renewable Natural Resources, I studied German even more so I could read scientific texts on the topic of forestry. After all, the Germans are some of the best foresters in the world (Black Forest and all...).

However my aspirations as a forester were to change forever.

As a student during the Ronald Reagan administration I witnessed to "Cut 'em Down" James Watt at the helm of the US Department of The Interior. Under Watt's misguided hand, thousands of acres of pristine federal land were sold off to big lumber companies, and entire living ecosystems were slaughtered in the name of big-business profit. After several hard years of book study at the university, I realized my efforts at studying German and Forestry were going to land me a job managing a bunch of tree stumps, or cleaning toilets while wearing a park officer's uniform and sidearm - a kind of homeland toilet defense job.

Watt's chop-down policy had left my future stumped - quite literally. I had to change my area of study. I had to make a hard decision.

JUST A CRAZY IDEA: CHINESE

After no small amount of soul searching, I made a decision filled with risk: to study Chinese language and culture.

In a late cold-war era America, it was commonly known fact that the Russian Bear kept company with the mysterious Chinese Dragon. For a great many, China was a mostly dangerous and foreboding land filled with fiendish slanty-eyed characters like Rohmer's Fu Manchu and Harte's "Heathen Chinee".

No small amount of fear and intimidation rang in the voices of my friends and colleagues back then. "Why study Chinese?" "Oh, it's a useless language." "China is a closed country." "Don't they all wear those tilted hats?" "How could they be a nice people? Aren't they all a bunch of commies?"

To most people with whom I had spoken about my decision to study Chinese, it made absolutely no sense at all. I even lost friends over this decision.

WHY CHINESE LANGUAGE?

In an America still reeling from the horrible wars in Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia, I was surrounded with people whose lives were forever smashed by strife in Asia. While in the 1960's followers of George Harrison went to India and Bangladesh for peace, for me in the 1980's there was another land that seemed much vaster, more ancient, and seemingly more peaceful than any other.

Right or wrong, for me this land was China. China was an ancient land filled with an alluring and utterly inexplicable mystery.

My decision: to change my college major to Oriental Studies with a specialty in Chinese language.

AN INVESTMENT THAT PAID OFF

The start in Chinese language that my schooling gave me was a solid foundation for the fluency I was to enjoy later. After speaking, reading and writing Chinese for nearly 20 years, I am so glad of the investment I made in learning this language.

Sometime after graduating from college, I got the chance to live in China and even went through some hard times there. Back then, I hadn't landed on my chosen career as a writer. But my work as Regional Manager for a Danish cargo company shipping heavy machinery for factories gave me valuable experience in my later work as a freelance industrial consultant and later in my chosen career as a technical writer.

LEARN A NEW LANGUAGE: IMMERSE YOURSELF, KEEP IT ALIVE

My suggestion to technical writers wishing to further their career: get a good start in another language and then immerse yourself.

Go to a country where your chosen language is spoken every day, all the time. Even after leaving that foreign country, keep that language alive by practicing it - by any means. For me, in the absence of having Chinese colleagues at my place of work, practicing Chinese meant frequent visits to speak with the help at Chinese restaurants.

CHINESE: AN ANCIENT LANGUAGE WITH A FUTURE

"China? There lies a sleeping giant. Let him sleep! For when he wakes he will move the world. - Napoleon Bonaparte, c. 1800

How true ring the French general's words now.

After returning from China, I began my career as a technical writer more than a decade ago. While folks weren't shoving and scrambling to get me to go back overseas to help them do business with China, the stage was being set: American businesses were slowly racking up a debt with the Middle Kingdom.

Thanks for the buyers of products made by Mattel and Wal-Mart, America is now inextricably involved with China. How many day-to-day products fill our homes that do not bear the Made in China moniker? For those products that declare Made in the USA, you will find they shamefully rest upon a technicality: many are Assembled in the USA of imported materials.

With China as a rising military power, as the homeland of a growing minority (majority?) of Internet users, and the recent host of the Beijing 2008 Olympics, China is indeed a land with a future.

TECHNICAL WRITERS: LEARN ANOTHER LANGUAGE

If you're technical writer and you seek to expand your career horizons, I urge you to expand your career horizons and help close the borders among the nations - learn a new language.

By breaking the perceived mold of a timid closet-bound artiste whose hard work hardly gets its due attention, as a multi-lingual writer you will become a part of a tide that will help other technical writers break into a world that embraces globalization, and the friendly communication that would otherwise not be there.

A years-long investment I made in learning a foreign language has finally paid off. It can for you, too.

Better opportunities await the polyglots!

- John

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