Since I am completely swamped with work, I thought I'd share Per N. Dohler's very interesting translator profile from the Translation Journal (Volume 7, No. 1, January 2003).
Have fun reading!
Have fun reading!
How Not to Become a Translatorby Per N. Dohler | ||
Anyway, here it goes.
I know what I am talking about. In my first years as a translator I did almost everything wrong, and I certainly made plenty of the most elementary mistakes. I'd say I wasn't even a translator initially; I was just posing as one. True, I had an academic background in U.S. literature and English linguistics, painfully acquired after meandering through the academic system for too many years (easy enough to do at those unstructured German universities). And, having spent a couple of years in California, I felt that my English was adequate and that I knew a little about the U.S. But that, of course, is nowhere near good enough to hang out one's shingle as a translator. My first paid translations were done, somewhat accidentally, in 1982, for a professor of history. I had to translate source documents from U.S. history into German for inclusion in an annotated textbook. The volume in question did eventually appear; my contribution was hardly recognizable. But no one told me what I had done wrong, or how. The next step in that dubious career of mine came over a year later, when my father—a dentist and director of the state dental association—referred Germany's largest dental publisher to me (just like that, he had no idea whether I would perform OK or not). So I started doing dental translations, all of which were edited by my father. ("That may sound good, Per, but it's not what a dentist would ever say!") (HINDSIGHT: What I gained from this cooperation over the next few years was the best practical education in the field I could have had, short of actually becoming a dentist myself.) But from a business angle, the whole setup was a disaster because I simply swallowed what I was fed. I would receive two or three dental articles a month to translate from English into German. I was getting paid by the printed page, a few months after the article appeared in print (if it appeared), at a rate set by the publisher. It was not until over a year later that a new editorial coordinator took pity on me and suggested that I submit an invoice for what I had not heretofore thought of as accounts receivable. Meanwhile, my M.A. thesis was finally completed, even well received—but there were no jobs for linguists. I'd had an invitation to work toward a Ph.D. at the University of California at Berkeley, but the family finances did not stretch that far. To turn a dead end into something useful, I started out to get a second degree, this time in computer science (there were, and still are, no tuition charges at German universities, so that was no problem). Something with language and computers—that could be hot, or so we thought, even though it was not quite clear how. (HINDSIGHT: This was going to give me an enormous advantage in the 1990s, when localization became a big hit.) To put bread on the table, I continued working for my dental publisher, even acquired a second one and a pharmaceutical company somehow (word of mouth, probably), and audited assorted university-level classes in medicine and dentistry. I managed to muddle through in this manner for some time more. Finally, one morning in 1988—six years after my first translation!—I looked at myself in the mirror and said, almost a bit surprised, "You, Per, are actually a translator." (HINDSIGHT: I was not, yet.) I dropped out of school, bought a new computer and more dictionaries, sent out some makeshift mailings—I didn't know anything about marketing either—and actually landed one or two new clients.
Translators must be one of the most interesting breeds of people. Many are probably a little weird, myself quite possibly not excluded; but most of those I met in the ensuing years—and I met plenty of colleagues at home and abroad over the years, enjoyed their company, enjoyed their hospitality, tried to lure them to Barendorf ("Hotbed of North German Translation"), almost as if to make up for lost time—are really interesting people with strong opinions, which they are eager to try on others. We come from an incredible wealth of backgrounds and bring this diversity to the incredible wealth of worlds that we translate from and into. I don't know who said it, I may even have made this up myself: "Everything I ever learned I learned from someone else." In my case, when it comes to the art, the craft, and the business of translation, the "someone else" would usually have been someone I originally met on FLEFO, and the time would have been the early 1990s. So in this manner, I became a translator after all. Things have been largely uphill ever since. Appendix 1: How To Be a Translator I am afraid more people than care to admit it have taken an equally long time and equally circuitous routes in becoming translators. If you are just starting out, save yourself some valuable time. Do not emulate our haphazard paths. Instead, proceed as follows:
Appendix 2: Truisms ... or Controversial Food for Thought Translators
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