The first year in translation

On 4 July 2012, I celebrated my first translataversiary, which I thought would provide a fantastic chance to reflect back on the previous year to see what (if anything) I have achieved and what I still have to achieve in the future.

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?