Tradukado

It was 2009, and the dust from the latest global financial crisis was still settling: not the best time for a fresh graduate to be job-hunting. Fortunately, thanks in part to my university’s extensive alumni network, I managed to land a role at a small, quality-focused translation agency in Brussels. It was an excellent place to cut my linguistic teeth. If I had questions, I could fire them at either of the two senior translators with whom I shared an office, and, in those first six or so months, I received detailed feedback on virtually every piece of work I produced. I quickly learned that a translator’s best friends were not his dictionary and thesaurus, but Humility and Paranoia. My manager’s favourite refrain – “you are only as good as your last job” – still rings in my ears from time to time. On the face of it, H&P were not the best company. After all, what kind of friends would continually prompt you to second-guess yourself? But, as I discovered, on the rare occasion that I forgot to bring them to the office with me, they quietly protected me from that training yard bully Mortal Embarrassment (a.k.a. Big Bad Barry). It must be said that Barry was a very effective teacher, but, as he knew and employed no other learning model than positive punishment, he was to be avoided at all costs. I will probably never forget the time that, under immense time pressure, I ran a short German article through a machine translator, post-edited the garbled results and submitted them to my manager for review, only to be called into his office for a dressing-down. You see, in my haste, I had failed to notice that the machine had dutifully translated the author’s surname, “Mantel”, into its English equivalent “coat”. “Why on Earth did you do that?”, my manager asked. I had no answer. I just stood there, dumbfounded and beetroot red. Needless to say, ever since then, I have kept a couple of metaphorical pews at my desk for my old friends, H&P.