MFL good career?

Can modern foreign languages lead to any highly paid jobs? I'm passionate about languages but I want a really successful career at the same time... Is anyone able to advise me please?

I'm choosing my A Level subjects for this year so your advice will be really useful for that.

Yes. A lot of high paying jobs do not require a degree in a specific subject.

Can modern foreign languages lead to any highly paid jobs? I'm passionate about languages but I want a really successful career at the same time... Is anyone able to advise me please?

I'm choosing my A Level subjects for this year so your advice will be really useful for that.

Languages are very highly sought after and eternally rewarding!

At university, I did French, Spanish and Japanese. After graduating, I did some freelance interpreting in Japan while working at a private firm assisting medical and business clients with English translation. Now, I'm back to studying in the UK and am applying for postgraduate courses in International Relations with the hope of applying for the British diplomatic service.

My friends who did a Japanese degree have gone onto the following jobs: working in immigration offices in Japan, working in local Japanese governments such as Fukushima, Beppu and Kyoto (one such example: https://rediscoverfukushima.com/), working at the consulate general (embassy) in Edinburgh, working for the NHK (Japan's version of BBC) in both Tokyo and London, investment banking, working in Japanese translation (environmental and video games), practicing Law in Japan, working at a local sake brewery in Okayama (https://www.originsake.com/?fbclid=I...0neClapyuUuqyY), lecturing at universities in Japan and the UK and so on and so forth.

My university friends who studied French and Spanish have gone onto working at the European Parliament, investment banking, tourism and so on.

When you study a languages degree, you don't just study the language. For example, during my undergraduate degree I took various modules on Japan-China foreign policy, international relations, politics, French immigration laws, Spanish journalism writing etc. What's more, regarding the language component of our degrees, there were modules consisting of translations of dense political documents, medical documents, historical religious documents, both classical and contemporary literary texts as well as journalistic articles among many others.

Although I don't regret studying languages at university, I might have considered studying something like Economics or International Relations alongside a language or two because recently I've realised that those are the fields that I'd like to apply my linguistic background in. That said, when I first applied to university I didn't know what I wanted to do, so in that sense I was a little lost because my degree wasn't focused on a specific career. But, the good thing was that languages can be applicable to many different sectors.

If you'd like to do languages, go for it. If you'd like to do languages + something like Law/Economics/IR/whatever, go for that too. If you're not sure at all, maybe consider a Scottish university where you study 3 subjects equally in your first 2 years. You can do 2 languages + another subject in almost anything. Gradually, you can decide to continue your degree with your 2 languages or 1 language + your other subject or just 1 language.

Originally, I remember thinking that I wanted to be an interpreter or a translator. Now, I'm pretty sure that I want to join either the diplomatic service or go into academia.

I'm also going to tag another fellow language graduate @IzzyAnne.

I agree that studying some kind of technical skill alongside languages is a good idea. Even translators have to specialise in order to be competitive, and it will give you a fall-back if you eventually decide you don't want a career as a linguist after all. Also, if you'd like to work abroad, you need to think about what job you'd like to do there. Speaking the language plus your own is enough to qualify you as a teacher in some countries, if that's what you'd like to be - or if you're lucky in tourism/ embassies etc (and even teachers get paid more if they can teach a particular subject in English, rather than just English). But if not, you'll be competing against native speakers who may also speak English, plus have specialist skills and work experience as well not having to have a visa sponsored.

It also depends which languages you learn. If you're investing a significant amount of time and money in a languages degree, I'd say push yourself and learn something rare or very difficult to pick up. The less second-language speakers exist of a particular language, the greater variety of job opportunities become available (I know people my age in crazy high-up jobs in China...just being a foreigner that can speak Chinese opens so many doors as not many non-natives ever become fluent!). Conversely, French-English is a very common language pair and there's a lot of material available to translate - but because so many people can speak both, you need to be extremely good or specialise in a very niche area in order to compete.

I'd say becoming fluent in Japanese would probably give you a greater chance of working in an embassy job, for example, than becoming fluent in French. It is a lot harder to get really good at Japanese so the talent pool is smaller and there is less competition.

Speaking as someone with a BA in French and Spanish with Chinese, who now wishes they invested more in Chinese, and is going back to do a Masters and get me a specialism

'


Wow. Thanks a lot for your insight, I really appreciate it

Aaaand...if you like the technical side of language learning, you can always learn to programme alongside, do linguistics modules and go into NLP (natural language processing). That's apparently a promising area!

Oh great. I hadn't thought of that before

I speak English (mother tongue), Spanish, Arabic, and (broken) Swahili, and I was considering doing one of the following:
French
Russian
German
Japanese (the thought of the really difficult script puts me off a bit though... :-( )

Would you recommend any one of those languages over the rest, or do you think there's a better option I could look at...?