Welcome to part two of our journey from linguistically-interested to professional linguist. We’re using the benefit of our wisdom and experience here to encourage or guide people who are perhaps interested in becoming translators and interpreters along their own personal journeys, so even though this may be well beneath you in terms of usefulness, please still feel free to add your own ideas and suggestions in the usual place. :)
Last week we looked at some of the formal education and training options available. Note that I’m not specifying ‘young people’ as being the target audience for this column, because although we may tend to automatically associate youth with studentship, translating is a field which is open to people of all ages to join. There are many people who come to it as a second, or new career, after becoming parents for example, or in their mid-life periods when they felt that a new direction would be a good thing. When I stopped by the UJ's Katedra UNESCO entrance exams a couple of years ago, most of the people I saw waiting to go in were middle-aged women with shopping bags and big dictionaries under their arms.
This illustrates, again, my firm belief that you can never be too old – or too experienced – not to benefit from a little refresher, or at least a small snack to chew on for a while, so let’s get cracking.
After School
So you’ve finished your schooling and you’re wondering where you’ll fit as a translator. The obvious options here are either freelancing, an in-house position with a translating agency, a company position within a firm, dealing with all their multi-language texts (although this seems to be something of a rarity these days as most companies are out-sourcing their language work), or even starting your own translating agency. We’ll have more on that soon when we welcome our first guest to the Article, a good friend of ours from Łódż, and also from someone who found a languague job in the media, but in the meantime let’s look at the first two options – freelance and in-house.
Pyjamas or Suits?
In terms of your immediate future post-school, these are the most likely options. You may even have done a praktyki at a local agency whilst in school, so you’ll have some idea of what the work is like. Agencies tend to run on a lot of contract work, i.e. annual bids for ongoing work from government bodies, large companies, cultural institutions etc. They win the bid, they get a giant lump of cash, and then for the next 12 months (for example) the client sends them whatever, whenever.
As an in-house translator, the work tends to be mostly the same types of things over and over again: business contracts, proposals, construction plans, media and marketing, PR stuff etc, which is further filtered by your own specialities. There may be two or three in-house translators, one of whom handles all the cultural and artistic texts while you’re doing the contracts and project documentation (although in practise the distinction is not always so clear, and you’ll be expected to to do a little of everything, esp. when it gets busy).
As a freelancer, you’ll probably be working mostly for agencies anyway, and so you’ll get the same stuff. There are advantages and disadvantages to not being in an office (which we’ll also look at at some point), but a lot of it boils down to a matter convenience. After a lifetime of dragging yourself out of bed to get to school, the temptation to just stay at home, turn on the computer in the mornings and go to work in your pyjamas is stronger than Darth Vader offering 50% discounts on joining the Dark Side of the Force.
Sign on the Dotted Line
On the other hand, the thought of an umowa pracę guaranteeing a steady stream of money also has lots of charm, particularly after the economic merry-go-round of student life. Freelancing requires that you find the work yourself and take the time to do all sorts of low-level marketing and PR things, whereas a translating agency does all that for you.
As a freelancer though, you can of course truly ‘be your own boss’, and take as much or as little work as you like. There’s a certain amount of insecurity that goes with this of course, but in time you’ll find that you’ve built up quite a collection of established clients, and you’ll know who you can rely on for steady work etc. In terms of guaranteed work, everyone has a core group of reliable clients, a surrounding ring of clients who are less frequently in touch, and a peripheral bunch who you may only hear from a few times a year.
A third option is to try and get an umowa o dzieło with a translating agency, which roughly means that you’re ‘theirs’ to send work to whenever they need to, which it then falls to you to accommodate or prioritise in and around your own personal work. This can create scheduling problems, sure, but they’re a hazard of the job anyway and with such a contract you can be assured of at least a little bit of reliable money each month.
Okay, that’s all for now. Employment contracts come in a wide variety of flavours and are a subject one could talk about for a long time. We will be doing just that in the future, but you won’t be hearing it from me. For this treat, we’ll find an expert who really knows their stuff. And if you are such an expert, please do feel free to email us at the address at the top of the page and perhaps we can work something out for a future piece. Otherwise, comments, ideas and opinions belooooww!
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