Yeah, he discovered the cruel truth that translation work isn't seen as cerebral at all by most people, and just thought of as factory labor, to be underpaid and forced to push as hard as possible.
I was once on a similar path, localizing MMOs, and am so glad i got out of that and into software development.
The best part of it was that I was basically getting paid to learn Japanese. Had I continued on that path my language skills would be amazing at this point.
I only got the job at a point where i was already very fluent in english, and got into dev because i had enough learning time to learn programming skills to help the translations.
As for your language skills, does that mean you live in japan, have a business selling things from japan, but aren't fully fluent?
(Also, as a subscriber, i adore the service and hope you'll be doing it for some time to come. :D)
Yes, there's a standard Japanese test which has levels 1 to 5, called JLPT. 1 is the highest and 5 lowest, I was able to pass level 2. It's sort of exponential though, you need to know twice as much for each next level basically.
I seem to recall that Japanese Universities require level 3 for exchange students to enroll in Japanese language classes. That's probably not enough to follow lectures, but probably enough to get to the level of being able to follow lectures after 3-6 months.
My literacy is pretty poor, so I don't think I'd be able to pass a level 3 test, but I think apart from the literacy part it's probably a decent description of my current level.
Coming from latin-alphabet languages, it takes some effort to get up to speed -- the primary school curriculum is 1006[1] kanji characters, along with 2*48[2] (depending of how one counts) kana. And that's just the bare minimum, general literacy is ~3000 kanji.
It's a fascinating language, and learning it gives some interesting linguistic perspectives because it's so different, especially from other big languages. It's also a rather simple language -- the main difficulty lies in how different Japanese is, due to the long isolation.
I was once on a similar path, localizing MMOs, and am so glad i got out of that and into software development.