40 years of translating

Tags

4oth anniversary, CAT tools, Freelancer, Professional translator, self-employment, Technology, Translation, Working methods

On Tuesday, it was my eldest granddaughter Zoë’s 5th birthday (how time flies!) and coincidentally also 40 years to the day since I started working as a translator. I joined British Nuclear Fuels in Warrington as part of their small in-house translation team in 1984 and honed my craft there before leaving to go freelance after the birth of my eldest son, Zoë’s daddy, 5 years later.

There have been many changes in the way I work in the meantime, not least the introduction of computers! When I first started, we used to dictate all our translations for the typing pool. Translations of telex messages were commonplace, fax machines hadn’t even been invented and research involved a trip to the UKAEA Library just around the corner on the Risley nuclear campus. We also had a lot of dictionaries as there was no internet to look up tricky words, but we did have constant access to engineers on the other end of the ‘phone line. Site visits (often for interpreting assignments) were useful too; there’s nothing like actually seeing the things you’re translating about and having to go through all the radiation checks to enter controlled areas certainly sticks it in your mind! On the plus side, deadlines were much more generous, especially in the civil service sector.

BNFL introduced DisplayWrite word processors in the late 80s and I had to learn how to type a lot faster, but for a long time copying and pasting still meant typing out legends for diagrams and cutting them up to glue onto a paper copy of the figures…. I vividly recall going to an ASLIB Translation and the Computer conference in London in 1987, around the time of the Great Storm, and hearing about this new-fangled thing called e-mail – and dismissing it as a pipe dream! I bought my first Amstrad PC and daisywheel printer when I went freelance in 1989, swiftly followed by an answering machine, then a fax. Interesting to think that faxes are no longer part of the freelancer’s arsenal, just as any thermal printouts lying around in my files have long since faded into insignificance.

In the mid-90s I purchased my first multi-media machine, a Compaq; we had to drive all the way over to Edinburgh from the West Coast of Scotland to get it, it probably cost as much as a small car (!) and my young children thought it was amazing – it’s a wonder I got a look in! I can still remember the joys of connecting to clients and transferring files via modem (along with the distinctive noise!). Then there was the glossary that took a whole day and night to download. A courier would doubtless have been cheaper, but my client did, thankfully, agree to pay the telephone bill!

Since then, I’ve upgraded computers every 4-5 years, gradually getting to grips with ever-changing technology with the aid of my computer-whizz sons when they were around. I plunged into the world of CAT tools in 2009 after attending an ITI workshop given by Michael Benis in Leeds where he explained the intricacies of Déjà Vu, Trados and Wordfast, and soon became a convert to Wordfast, In 2011, soon after the arrival of puppy Leo, I invested in Trados in a quiet spell, encouraged by two clients who have since moved on to MemoQ, but I’ve stuck with Trados, which works for me – most of the time, anyway. I’ve come full circle now that I’m dictating most of my translations again thanks to Dragon, which I discovered after a severe bout of RSI 15 or so years ago. Plus ça change…

I still love my chosen career 40 years on and have no intention of retiring just yet, despite all the changes in the translation sector recently. Thanks to my lovely clients for keeping me busy and my equally lovely colleagues for keeping me sane! Looking forward to seeing some of you in Seville and Edinburgh over the next few months.

BNFL colleagues and partners, late 1980s

Very few pictures of me in early 1984 (I wonder why?! – although mobile phones were not a thing in those days, certainly not with cameras). This was at a uni friend’s fancy-dress birthday party just before I started at BNFL.