That's if you can find in-house translating gigs. Some companies (like Nintendo) have a consistent stream of new material to translate into English. owever most companies do not, and most (if not all) manga and anime publishers outsource.

The typical flow of work is from the end user to Dentsu, which handles PR for most companies in Japan and owns the universe. Dentsu then hands the translation work to a translation agency. Of course there may be another intermediary between the end user and the translation agency, or not, especially if the agency has its own printing and publishing facilities or affiliate. Outside, freelance translators do the bulk of the translation, but there is usually one translator in-house at the translation agency to do touch-up work. Some companies have more.

Thanks everyone for the advice and help... I wasn't expecting so many replies...

Working for Nintendo would be pretty cool... even if the pay (at least at the start) wouldn't be so great.

If money is better in Japan though I'd definately rather work there, of course it's not just about the money, but any kind of opportunity to be a translator would be great.

Working Nintendo to do what? Majority of their games are created by a vendor, so its likely that the job will be a hardware job of some sort if you are interested to be part of anything to do with games....

Well they need some people to translate their games, or if not I believe there is localization testing.

Ah, thats true, forgot about that... yeah, testing is fun.. good luck:)

Is it really, or is that a joke?... :D

Nintendo has a growing in-house group of translators. The volume of Wii and DS games coming from Japan is growing exponentially.

yeah, i totally overlooked that

I was serious about testing, I have been in the software testing field for the last 12 years, its fun... i like it.. game testing can get boring because you are not "playing the game" for the most part, testing it mean, let say a driving game, doing the same thing, same spot over and over again if you need to retest issues or such

Actually it is a sticky in the Living in Japan section.