Happy Valentine´s Day! Another lull in my work from the agency in NYC gives me the chance to muse about the unexpected aspects of translating professionally.
One of these, perhaps not very unexpected, is to me perhaps the single most enjoyable thing about working as a translator. I learn something new with every project. It is passionately exciting to see words that I have never seen! I LOVE my Real Academia Española dictionary for Spanish words, and my dear partner David splurged and gave me an on-line subscription to the Oxford English Dictionary, which is like pure, exquisite, intense, dark chocolate to a linguist like me :). I learn new WORDS with almost every project, but I also frequently learn new concepts, and am introduced to fields of human endeavor that are far removed from my daily life and acquire the tinge of fascination provided by the "exotic".
I took a rush job last week in the field of life sciences, where I usually don´t work at all. I do however hold the French Baccalaureate in Mathématiques et Sciences de la Nature, so I was not too daunted by the subject matter. It fit in nicely in a gap in my other ongoing project, a fraud investigation for a major department store chain in Mexico. The life sciences project was full of scientific acronyms in Spanish, and of course knowing the reversal of positioning for adjectives and nouns from one language to another, I was alert to the fact that ARN was RNA and VHC was HVC, and that RVS in English is SVR (sustained virologic response). Then I got to PCR...assuming it would be RCP or something in English. A quick Google search however, led me to conclude that the Spanish scientific language uses the common English acronym for this one, which is in fact the acronym for polymerase chain reaction.
Which leads me to another lesson that is brought home to me every time I translate: never take anything for granted! I am glad that I love research, because I have to do it for every single project! Whether it is an entirely new concept, an idea that resembles another with which I AM familiar, but is not exactly the same, or lack of correspondence between semantic fields from one language to another, it is never safe to make assumptions when translating. Sometimes, I find a word that has no corresponding lexical item in the target language, as I did a couple of weeks ago with a financial term: anticresis. With these obscure legal-financial terms that are in a register that most people don´t ever stumble upon in their daily life, I frequently find an equally obscure English cognate that is virtually identical. And although I think my vocabulary is extensive, as often as not, it is a word that I don´t remember ever seeing. This one, however, can only be translated into English, as far as I could determine after exhaustive research, by "Welsh mortgage". So quaint, fascinating and excellent! This means the owner of a property gives up the product of the property to his creditor.
So these are some of the happy lessons that delight the intellectual magpie in me, shiny things that I put away in my mental nest to later turn over like Gollum in his hoard, deriving an almost obscene pleasure from my new intellectual treasure. Thankfully the place where I keep these things is like a womb...expands to fit its contents...or like the inside of Oscar the Grouch´s house...much bigger than it seems from the outside.
I have had some not-so-pleasant lessons on the business front in the past weeks, as well! Both of them taught me that I am lacking in experience in assessing the potential for problems in an assignment. In the first, I was asked to proofread 12,000 words of contract material in 5 hours. As I looked back at the other proofreading jobs I have done, I realized that experience told me to expect to spend no less than 8 hours on this job--assuming the original translation had been done by a translator who was somewhat proficient. I accepted the assignment anyway, not seeing the potential for trouble there! About 75% of the way through, I realized I would never finish on time, and with still 2 hours to go before the deadline, emailed the project manager and informed her that if the job were to be completed to anyone´s satisfaction, some of the remainder should be handed over to another linguist. She asked me to just do my best, which I did. At the deadline, I told her I had not finished, and sent what I had done to her. She then added another hour to the PO and told me to gallop onward and complete the rest as best I could. Well, I knew I couldn´t do the job to my accustomed high quality standards, but after informing her of this and receiving instructions to go ahead anyway, I did so, KIND of completing the job about an hour and a half later. Knowing it probably still had some pretty glaring problems that could not be remedied by a quick read-through, I handed it over anyway, assuming that the need for perfection with the project must not be as high as I had imagined. I forgot about it and moved on to other projects, but when I requested the final PO to send in my invoice, was informed that due to the client having found an error, I would not be paid in full. I was outraged to say the least, and responded with a blow-by-blow account of things from my end, including my request to have some of the job assigned to someone else, and my warning that I COULD NOT do justice to the usual quality requirements in such a short time. In the end, they told me that the client had had to take responsibility for the quality issues, due to the job having been submitted as an extreme rush. I could certainly attest to that, as the translation that I corrected, while it was all one document, had 3 clearly defined sections done by 3 linguists of highly varying ability! The first section was great, and sections 2 and 3...well, I don´t want to be uncharitable, but let´s just say, NOT SO MUCH!
Anyway....live and learn! That is the first and last time I will ever accept a proofreading job that expects me to get through more than 1,500 words per hour.
There is one more experience that I want to share, but my lull has just been broken by my first assignment in French! It´s a quick and dirty 1,700-word document due for tomorrow. I know I will have to research this twice as much as I would if it were in Spanish...I am just not as accustomed to working in French. But I do love la belle langue and I am sure to enjoy my research as much as I always do, even though I will be doing a lot more of it on this one!
I LOVE TRANSLATING! Back to work and hasta la vista.
One of these, perhaps not very unexpected, is to me perhaps the single most enjoyable thing about working as a translator. I learn something new with every project. It is passionately exciting to see words that I have never seen! I LOVE my Real Academia Española dictionary for Spanish words, and my dear partner David splurged and gave me an on-line subscription to the Oxford English Dictionary, which is like pure, exquisite, intense, dark chocolate to a linguist like me :). I learn new WORDS with almost every project, but I also frequently learn new concepts, and am introduced to fields of human endeavor that are far removed from my daily life and acquire the tinge of fascination provided by the "exotic".
I took a rush job last week in the field of life sciences, where I usually don´t work at all. I do however hold the French Baccalaureate in Mathématiques et Sciences de la Nature, so I was not too daunted by the subject matter. It fit in nicely in a gap in my other ongoing project, a fraud investigation for a major department store chain in Mexico. The life sciences project was full of scientific acronyms in Spanish, and of course knowing the reversal of positioning for adjectives and nouns from one language to another, I was alert to the fact that ARN was RNA and VHC was HVC, and that RVS in English is SVR (sustained virologic response). Then I got to PCR...assuming it would be RCP or something in English. A quick Google search however, led me to conclude that the Spanish scientific language uses the common English acronym for this one, which is in fact the acronym for polymerase chain reaction.
Which leads me to another lesson that is brought home to me every time I translate: never take anything for granted! I am glad that I love research, because I have to do it for every single project! Whether it is an entirely new concept, an idea that resembles another with which I AM familiar, but is not exactly the same, or lack of correspondence between semantic fields from one language to another, it is never safe to make assumptions when translating. Sometimes, I find a word that has no corresponding lexical item in the target language, as I did a couple of weeks ago with a financial term: anticresis. With these obscure legal-financial terms that are in a register that most people don´t ever stumble upon in their daily life, I frequently find an equally obscure English cognate that is virtually identical. And although I think my vocabulary is extensive, as often as not, it is a word that I don´t remember ever seeing. This one, however, can only be translated into English, as far as I could determine after exhaustive research, by "Welsh mortgage". So quaint, fascinating and excellent! This means the owner of a property gives up the product of the property to his creditor.
So these are some of the happy lessons that delight the intellectual magpie in me, shiny things that I put away in my mental nest to later turn over like Gollum in his hoard, deriving an almost obscene pleasure from my new intellectual treasure. Thankfully the place where I keep these things is like a womb...expands to fit its contents...or like the inside of Oscar the Grouch´s house...much bigger than it seems from the outside.
I have had some not-so-pleasant lessons on the business front in the past weeks, as well! Both of them taught me that I am lacking in experience in assessing the potential for problems in an assignment. In the first, I was asked to proofread 12,000 words of contract material in 5 hours. As I looked back at the other proofreading jobs I have done, I realized that experience told me to expect to spend no less than 8 hours on this job--assuming the original translation had been done by a translator who was somewhat proficient. I accepted the assignment anyway, not seeing the potential for trouble there! About 75% of the way through, I realized I would never finish on time, and with still 2 hours to go before the deadline, emailed the project manager and informed her that if the job were to be completed to anyone´s satisfaction, some of the remainder should be handed over to another linguist. She asked me to just do my best, which I did. At the deadline, I told her I had not finished, and sent what I had done to her. She then added another hour to the PO and told me to gallop onward and complete the rest as best I could. Well, I knew I couldn´t do the job to my accustomed high quality standards, but after informing her of this and receiving instructions to go ahead anyway, I did so, KIND of completing the job about an hour and a half later. Knowing it probably still had some pretty glaring problems that could not be remedied by a quick read-through, I handed it over anyway, assuming that the need for perfection with the project must not be as high as I had imagined. I forgot about it and moved on to other projects, but when I requested the final PO to send in my invoice, was informed that due to the client having found an error, I would not be paid in full. I was outraged to say the least, and responded with a blow-by-blow account of things from my end, including my request to have some of the job assigned to someone else, and my warning that I COULD NOT do justice to the usual quality requirements in such a short time. In the end, they told me that the client had had to take responsibility for the quality issues, due to the job having been submitted as an extreme rush. I could certainly attest to that, as the translation that I corrected, while it was all one document, had 3 clearly defined sections done by 3 linguists of highly varying ability! The first section was great, and sections 2 and 3...well, I don´t want to be uncharitable, but let´s just say, NOT SO MUCH!
Anyway....live and learn! That is the first and last time I will ever accept a proofreading job that expects me to get through more than 1,500 words per hour.
There is one more experience that I want to share, but my lull has just been broken by my first assignment in French! It´s a quick and dirty 1,700-word document due for tomorrow. I know I will have to research this twice as much as I would if it were in Spanish...I am just not as accustomed to working in French. But I do love la belle langue and I am sure to enjoy my research as much as I always do, even though I will be doing a lot more of it on this one!
I LOVE TRANSLATING! Back to work and hasta la vista.
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