My Experiences and Advice

Imagine the scene… you buy a brand new DVD player and eagerly rush home to watch the DVD of ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’ you have also just bought. But when you open the box for the DVD player the instructions are all in Japanese, and when you eventually manage to get the thing plugged in and working, the film you are watching is entirely in Chinese. Never mind, you think, picking up the Kafka novel lying on your desk – only to find that it is written in German. Or, you log onto the internet to look for holidays only to find all the information on France is in French, on Greece in Greek, and as for information on Egypt – well, ...

As part of my degree course in German and French there was, of course, a certain amount of translation work to do, and as well as doing the mandatory language classes that used translation assignments, I also took three modules in Translation Methodology. At the time I had no idea that I would end up making a living from translation, as I seemed destined for the bright lights of the then buoyant telecommunications industry. However, upon arriving in Austria and discovering that the job-market was very flat and also that there seemed to be no sense of urgency in recruiting, in fact I was still receiving rejection letters from companies that I applied to up to 4 ...

Picture the scene: "übernehmen" is either "copy", "transfer", "apply", "adopt" or "take over", while "Auftrag" ALWAYS means "order" - apart from in my area, where it means "request". These are just a few of the difficulties that face us translators at the company I work for in Germany. I work as an in-house translator at a very large software company near Heidelberg, Germany, and have been here for just over a year now. Although I may not be the most experienced translator around - far from it in fact - I have learnt many things over the course of the year, not least how different ...