Niamh's job log: 1

Aiming for a career in the competitive world of translation, Niamh Lynch has found her first work - in Madrid - through a lucky break.

Just for the craic

About halfway through writing my Master’s thesis for Dublin City University, I was overcome by an excruciating feeling of boredom. Sorting through the same material, once, twice, countless times to see where are fitted, where it made sense and where it didn’t was mind-numbingly boring. Already glued to the laptop, surfing the internet for something, anything, that wasn’t EU language policy became my number one activity. For the craic, I applied for jobs. In fact, I applied for anything that moved - internships, graduate programmes, and voluntary placements. The day I was simultaneously offered a job as an administrator for a beekeeping course in Africa and 20 minutes later was turned down as the PA to the director of Good Food magazine, however, reality struck home. I disabled the internet connection, and got back to work.

A few months later on the bus into Dublin, I answered a phone call from a Spanish number. On the line was a woman from a translation company in Madrid that I had done a test translation for in the midst of my boredom. She was offering me a six month contract in their company in Madrid. I kicked myself for having initiated a conversation in Spanish – I was so excited I was afraid I had misunderstood her – and gave her good reason to doubt her choice of intern as I asked her three times, just to make sure I had understood.

I think I was so excited, that although I heard the terms of the job, I didn’t really take them in. Later on that day, breaking the news to my boyfriend, he quickly helped put things in perspective. “€600 a MONTH! How the bleep are you going to survive on THAT?!” That was going to turn out to be a very, very good question…

No more nine-to-five

I graduated in Spanish and Politics in 2004. I got a job immediately in events management, and had a great time in it for a year. I was making good money, travelling widely (and staying in posh hotels when I did) and working in an interesting and challenging job. I knew that I could stay there for several years and be very comfortable, , but I wasn’t happy. I loved the work, but the thought of the monotony of the 9-5 future was awful It is a very personal opinion, I know, and lots of people would have been delighted with my job, but it just wasn’t right for me.

After a while it dawned on me that my favourite part of the job was writing the company’s website, catalogues and letters, and talking to the Latin American conference delegates. I also dawned on me that those activities made up a very tiny part of the job, a part that was likely to get smaller as my responsibility grew greater. Unbeknownst to anyone, work and family alike, I applied for an MA in translation. I kept so quiet because I wasn’t sure I would be accepted. Despite doing well in my degree, a family problem of epic proportions in my final year meant the grades in some heavily weighted continuous assessment based courses suffered. Although I pulled everything back together for the final exams, there was nothing I could do about the continuous assessment grades, so despite getting As and Bs in all my final exams, I still graduated with only a 2:2. I was devastated, but fortunately the MA applications board paid more attention to my letters of recommendation than the class of degree, and in September 2005, I started a year-long MA in Translation Studies, specialising in Spanish.

The course was hard and long, and combined with the commute from hell and nightmare part-time job; I couldn’t really say it was enjoyable. It was, however, very educational and well-respected in the translation community, and was worth the hard slog. Interestingly, several people dropped out of the translation stream, having decided that the reality of translation was not to their liking, and, in a nutshell, boring. I loved it however, and by the time we were writing our theses, was one of the few people who were still actually interested in pursuing translation full-time.

That wasn’t going to be easy though, because the opportunities for translators are few, and the old ‘can’t get work without having experience, and can’t build experience without having a job’ chestnut is very true. So when I got the offer for the internship in Madrid, I took it immediately, rubbish pay and impending long-distance relationship notwithstanding.

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