First Day

Today was the first day of my new job. I got on the internet at 11am. At 11.30 they sent me my assignment. An article of about 1800 words about the petroleum industry in Brazil. After I had asked for him to give me an idea of how much time I could have, the employee who sent the text to me said 'faz tranquilo e bem revisado, ai nos medimos quanto tempo levou', do it calmly and edit it well so then we can see how long it took. At 2.30 the boss asked me, 'are you ready to hand it in yet?' I was halfway through. I replied that, no, I was only on the second page, and asked if I was translating too slowly. He said 'yes, lol.'

Because apparently everything is less offensive with a lol on the end.

After that, I rushed through the text. I eventually turned it in without editing properly because I was worried that I would waste too much time. That was stupid. Thirty minutes afterward I realised that I had mismatched columns in the PDF document - I had missed a paragraph. I told him that I knew it was unprofessional but that I had to fix it and resend the document. I fixed it in ten minutes. He had already sent the document to the client. I felt really stupid.

I was speaking to him online throughout the day and he said that their translators produce on average 700 words per hour without translating software . I felt awful. The rate that I went at today was 300 per hour (and I don't have the software either). From my brain and internet research. I do not touch any automatic translators on the internet. I thought, wow,700 per hour, that sounds crazy - but hey, maybe I really am just slow.

Anyway, I had a cry to myself about being dumb and then I had a look around on the internet and it seemed like I had at least a normal-good pace for technical translations. But that's relative, I know.

It makes me wonder though, who the hell are these people who are doing the translations this fast? They must be native Portuguese speakers translating into English without doing much research on terminology and who think to themselves, hey, awesome translation, let's send it off, because they don't have a clue of how disjointed or artificial it sounds to a native English speaker. Texts like that cannot be of much quality.

Just saying. I will get faster with practice and one I get more used to the different technical jargons. But I do still think a good translation takes time and a bit of reflection on the less-obvious things. I don't settle on a word-for-word translation. That's not what it is about at all.

Look at me all-up-on-ma-high-horse! To be honest, clearly, I am not a professional translator, nor do I want to be. I have learnt Portuguese for less than a year and a half. What I want is to be a linguist. This is to sustain me while I spend some more time here to improve my Portuguese. And I like the fact that you get to learn more of the language while working. Anyway, the pay is good, so I hope they keep me and are not dodgy. We'll see. Suck it.