For a professional translator, the first project frequently involves a tight deadline and a tedious topic. The following are some experiences shared by 3 translators recalling their first opportunities to translate documents. These stories are also about more than just how they acquired their first project—they’re also about how these translators subsequently realized that they had stumbled upon their ideal career path.
- Lloyd Bingham
Is a professional translator that works with French, German, Spanish, Dutch and English?
His first serious project was a 10,000-word maintenance manual for a bottle-washing machine form German to English. The challenge was that the document was given to him as a scanned PDF, which meant he could not use any CAT tools or software to search and register terminology. Nonetheless, Bingham recalls how this experience taught him precisely how to research terminology. He also learned about the linguistic rule that German uses the passive more than English. For example, the manual said the screw is inserted’ in German, while the English rendition would be more direct and say: ‘insert the screw.’
- Marco Joss
The first professional translating opportunity for Joss was the result of a chance encounter. In June 2013 at Luton Airport, he met Guillem Balagué, a Spanish football expert. Joss decided to share his story about applying to work for Balagué the previous year and being rejected. Three months later, on a random Thursday evening, he got a phone call. He was asked to translate part of Guillem’s book on Messi for the following Monday. The project consisted of 12,000 words. In the end, he managed to reach the deadline and thus began his career as a professional translator and interpreter for football.
- Anthony Teixeira
Sometimes, projects just fall into your lap. Then you’re pushed into something you would have never thought was a career possibility. Texeira had the particular skills of speaking English, Japanese, and French. He had studied computer science and was working as a web programmer for a game localization agency. One day, the company had a big web translation project and were very close to their deadline. At that point, they told Texeira to translate as much as he could. Not knowing a thing about professional website translation services, he found himself in the middle of his first translation project. Texeira’s considerable computational experience gave him the ability to output 10,000 words a day. After submitting the document, the client was satisfied and Texeira had discovered that what he described as a soul-numbing experience led him to significantly better projects.
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