Niamh Lynch is in her second job in Madrid, employed as a translator. Alone in the office Well, the curse of the badly organised translator struck again last week, necessitating a temporary break from the blogging. I accepted a lovely freelance job, completely oblivious to the fact that the week I had to do it also happened to be the first time I was going to be left alone in the office – my boss was off to Egypt for the week. Now, when I say alone in the office, it’s not quite accurate. The other twenty people who normally work there were going to be there too, but since there are only two of us in the translation ‘department’, for all intents and purposes, I was working solo.
My boss had meant to sit me down and go through everything the Friday before he left, but things piled up and he ended up writing me a long email instead. To get an overall picture of how things went, I still have a job, nothing burned down and we didn’t lose any clients, but god, it was hard work… How to do adminThe most difficult thing about the week was coordinating clients, jobs and freelancers. I don’t normally do anything administrative; I translate Spanish to English for all six hours I spend in the office, and that suits me fine. Ruben handles English to Spanish and administration, and we more or less proofread each other’s work. We use freelancers if there is too much volume for us to handle, it is an extremely technical subject or in some unusual language combination that neither of us can handle (between us we cover Spanish, English, French, Portuguese and Catalan, the vast majority of our work). With Ruben gone, however, our translating capacity is reduced by half, so the freelancers got lucky. The outsourcing process is not difficult, but it is complicated and ate into my translation time. You get a request, acknowledge it, look for a freelancer, confirm their availability and price, contact the client, confirm THEIR price and delivery date, contact the freelancer again, confirm that they can go ahead with it and wait for it to be delivered. Then you confirm with the freelancer that you have received it, proofread it, send it to be edited, get it back, send it to the client and wait for confirmation of reception and satisfaction with job. That’s one measly outsourced translation, and I haven’t even touched on the billing process! Not quite perfectSome people have asked that since I speak both English and Spanish, couldn’t I translate both ways? The short answer is that yes, I can, but I shouldn’t. Of course, I can and do translate things into Spanish in a non-professional context, but translations should only be done by someone who is a native speaker in the target language (the language you want the document to end up in). We have all read terrible translations, but many of us have also read translations that aren’t terrible, exactly, just a bit….well, not how you or I would put it. Some sentences you have to read twice and other things sound a bit odd - the precise problems will depend a lot on the languages involved. Some people think these are problems they can live with, but (thank god!) others prefer not to take the chance. If someone ever offers you a non-native translation, be wary, very wary. Having a native do it isn’t a GUARANTEE of quality, of course, but it does up the chances. A free handTranslation is something that is often misunderstood by ‘civilians’, and my, erm, rants can go on and on….but luckily, I’ll spare you today! As it turned out, the freelance job was great; completely abstract magazine articles that I was given total freedom to translate how I pleased. They were long, and caused problems because for the week I was alone in my ‘proper’ job, I worked full time, only leaving a few hours in the evening and early morning (when I work best) to translate. I got it in on time, but it entirely demolished both weekends. I’ll take a closer look at my diary before I accept the next one. Unfortunately, I think that’s what I said last time… Read Niamh's previous blogs Share your comments about Niamh's blog |
