Getting a foot in
the ladder
I spent the Easter holidays of my final year of university
sending out speculative applications to translation agencies across the country
that employed in-house translators. What was surprising is how this country lacks
such agencies.
Surely, it is more profitable from the agencies’ point of view
to employ fresh graduates and provide them with training than to outsource all
work to freelancers, whilst providing an invaluable foothold in the ladder for
youngsters such as myself, who opted to take the route into translation without
a Master’s. Of course, there is then the problem of assuring quality from the
translations of some wet-behind-the-ears newbie, but we’ll get to that later.
The final year for students is demanding enough, not just in
terms of the pressure of exams, but the demands of finding a job too,
particularly in the current economic climate, with many of my peers still
looking for a job, let alone one that is relevant to their degree.
Nevertheless, I juggled exam revision with preparation for a
job interview at a leading translation company in the North East. The call to
say that I had got the job came on the day before my final exam and I started
just three weeks later.
The job also entailed moving to somewhere new, a rather
small town unlike the big cities that I am used to, meeting new friends, moving
in with my girlfriend – indeed an entirely new life.
Learning on the
job
Over the past year, I have been under the guidance of Senior
Translators, who provide constructive feedback on all my work, such as how I
can improve the terminology of a technical text, the syntax of a legal text or the style and flow of a
marketing text.
At this early stage in my career, it is important to obtain
experience in a wide range of subjects: financial, legal, technical, marketing,
business and in niche areas depending on our clients, with the aim of finding
areas of specialisation.
In line with company specialisms, I do many legal and technical translations: two very important, but very different areas. However, I have translated more words in texts that require a promotional or advertisement tone.
Fortunately, it is marketing texts that I prefer. Technical
texts require a more like-for-like or literal translation and legal texts
employ a completely unique lexicon not used in other fields. Promotional texts,
on the other hand, allow a greater degree of creativity and enable one to stray
further from the source text. What’s more, I am able to work more quickly with
marketing documents because the tone is less formal and reflects spoken
language to a certain extent. As a result, possible ways to translate a certain
sentence come to mind much more rapidly.
The problem with specialising in this area is that there
appears to be no specific training for it. Universities offer short CPD courses
in legal and financial translation, but not for marketing. It may be that it is
easier to teach terminology than style (which distinguishes marketing texts
from legal or technical for example). The solution? Perhaps a copywriting
course, which teaches how to improve the style and flow of a text to make it
more of an advertisement.
Use them or lose
them
I’m fortunate in being able to use five out of my seven
languages in my job – I don’t think a GCSE in Welsh (albeit an A*) and one year
of Catalan are sufficient to translate with. 
My company principally translates from German and Dutch,
hence I translate roughly 2/3 from German. French is my second most popular
language and Dutch third, although many of my colleagues take on more Dutch as
they studied it as a major part of their degree whereas I took it as an
optional module. Spanish is fourth, but a major flaw in these statistics is the
exclusion of work I do fairly frequently for the nautical sector from Spanish
to English. By including these jobs from now on, we shall hopefully have some
more accurate statistics next time.
So, I hope to see a better balance of languages in future,
but I am more or less content with the specialist areas of my translations. I
am gaining more and more experience in the common areas of translation, but
after just one year, I have come across highly specialised texts, from breast
implants to bottle washing machines, so who knows what the future holds?
