What should I do to become a translator?

Question

I have an extreme interest in languages/literature that has existed since I was about eight years old. I speak Swedish and English, and I'm learning Spanish now, which is real easy to me.

I've spent a countless amount of hours reading Wikipedia articles on grammatical aspects, such as dialects, idiolects, morphology, phonology, cases, ect, but also language aspects, such as how languages like English or German came to be.

A lot of high school students find language classes to be extremely boring, but I find them real intriguing. Anyway, I believe that being a translator for the government or United Nations would be awesome, but also for translating books, newspapers, magazines, ect.

Should I focus on majoring in a foreign language (I'm thinking Japanese or Russian) and Linguistics, or what?

Answer 1

Spanish is one of the 6 official languages of the UN, along with English, French, Arabic, Chinese, and Russian. If you like languages you have to focus on this 6. Just ask yourself why the UN have this languages as official languages.

Don´t waste your time learning any dialects, or something like that.