How I Became a Translator

There are some people in Japan who keep insisting on to make a translator a certified qualification, like an accountant or an attorney. Luckily, they haven't succeeded in those decades, although they have issued their certificate for a "qualified translator." I am not the one, never learned translation in the collage, nor passed an examination. I once attended a course taught by a distinguished translator, but I never finished it. In my opinion, a person is a translator not because he is qualified, but he is practicing translation.
Then, people will ask me how I became a translator. A person will be a translator when he starts practicing translation. Then, how will he start? It is still a mystery to me. Some start their career as an in-house translator. I am now working with a young translator, who once worked for a trading company. After she quit her job, the company asked her to translate their documents, and she became a freelance translator. I know another woman who simply asked a translation agency to give her a job. There is a patent specialist who once worked for a patent office, which she left to marry. After several years, she started her own translation agency with the experience and connection of her previous job.
My case is much more specific and personal. It is a long story to tell. Actually, I once wrote a book on it in Japanese. I don't want to repeat it here. I will just tell you a small episode in it.

I was trying to be a translator when I was young, but didn't know how. I thought I could be, and was looking for an opportunity to come, which never came. Sometimes I was confident enough that I can do any translation job given, and sometimes I felt so frightened that I would mess up the job I would be given. I was just imagining. Nothing real happened.
When I felt so small that I will never be able to handle a proper translation job, I wondered that if I actually could endure the pressure of the work. What I didn't know about myself was, that if I could write a long script. I never wrote a document longer than a page or two. I had translated many documents as my training, but they were all short ones. I wondered if I could handle longer translation, say, hundred pages of a book. It was just my imagination I was wondering. You can laugh at, but a young unexperienced man is always afraid of imagined troubles.
One day out of this fear, I decided to translate a whole book. This way, I should be able to prove myself that I actually can translate a long document, and be confident on this. I didn't know how long it would take, but I started anyway.
I chose a book out of the shelves of a book store, just because the author's name was familiar to me. The name was Richard Brautigan, a famous poet and writer in the beat generation. I have read some of his stories in Japanese translation, and found them interesting. I knew this book I chose was not translated yet, so, there was no need to worry that I would make a cheating on myself; I had to translate it all by myself. And most of all, the book was not too long. It had just a right volume for a beginner.
I translated the book in a month or two, and became confident enough to be a translator. And that could be the end of the story. I was confident, but the job I was looking for never came. My confidence didn't help me much, because I still didn't know how to be a translator.
Several month had passed, and I was surprised one night, browsing a newspaper, to find out that Richard Brautigan, the author of the story I translated personally, was found dead in his house. Apparently, he made suicide with his gun. I felt shivered because the story I translated was on a bullet to kill a boy. I almost felt it was the same bullet that hit the author himself.
Out of my shock, I sent my script of the translation to his publisher in Japan. I didn't hope nothing. I only wanted to express my condolence to someone somehow. The only one I could think of who knew Brautigan in Japan was the publisher, and I had to send my script to prove that I had something to do with the author. It was the era long before the Internet age.
I sent them, and forgot about it. But the publisher called me. They wanted to publish my translation. Out of blue, I became a translator.

You may call me lucky. But what luck do I have if this all happened with the tragedy of a lonely poet? I was happy to be a translator, but regretted on the way it happened.
I still feel uneasy. I feel like a ghost still haunts me. Is it a ghost of the dead poet? Or the shadows of the sadness I felt in my younger days? I still don't know.
And I still don't know how to be a translator, that I am.