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1. I am not an official translator but I know some stuff about the business. Mostly on the indie/VN end, not 8-4 or squeenix or whatever level. Most weeb media companies, esp for VNs, work near exclusively with contracted freelancers. There are some exceptions, but those want you to live in the US or Japan. Most companies avoid agencies for niche media; shiravune/johren is a kinda cringe exception. Nobody really wants to hire an agency, it's more expensive. 2. Contractor positions are usually remote. Full-time positions are usually onsite and usually somewhere with crazy cost of living (cali KEKW). 3. Depends a lot on the place. You might be working in Word for LNs, in Google Sheets for a lot of stuff, or with actual CAT tools (especially translation agencies seem to do this, but you don't really want to work for them if you can help it since you usually don't get credited and have an NDA). 4. Actually can't comment since I've never sought employment. It depends a lot on your networking skills + actual abilities... regrettably (twitter bad for you unless you heavily curate) a twitter presence can help here. 5. ...Usually you want at least N2 level proficiency for a translation job. This doesn't mean you need to have the JLPT pass, many smaller companies care less about this than your performance on translation tests. Anyone company takes people at lower skill level than one able to pass N2 is probably a shit company, yes offense. Apart from Japanese ability, English (target language, but English is in the highest demand) writing ability is also important. In general, translation has different components and some of them are hard to learn without actually translating yourself. As such, starting in fan translation is advisable. One risky "in" with translation companies for visual novels is to do a fan translation and sell it to the company. Note that the translation has to be good enough that the company wants to take it, and that you'll likely need to stall and piss off your fans as negotiations progress if you have gone public, plus you need to resolve tensions in your tl group etc etc. If you work with this goal I would be upfront about it to any member that wants to join. It's hard to recommend becoming a weeb media translator if you have any other prospects. The pay is bad, the job security precarious, the outlook grim (machine translation will increasingly be getting """"""good"""""" enough that companies will be more and more tempted to cut costs and do MTL post-editing rather than real translation, with shitty but good enough results). But if you choose to let the void gaze also into you, I can only wish you luck.

And to come to paint my house. And mow my lawn.