They are by far the most puzzling obstacles I’ve encountered in my work as a translator. They tend to appear in documents unannounced, with no back story, with no key or legend to help decipher them, and are often industry-specific – or, worse, company-specific. Of course, their purpose is intended to denote the title of something, usually an organisation, procedure, device, or in my case – since much of my work is pharmaceutical – to represent a medical condition, without having to write it out in full. Fine, if you happen to be in on these mysterious meanings.

I do not enjoy acronyms. Rather than saving time by shortening the number of words to be typed out, I waste endless time trying to track down their significance. Occasionally, the initials used are familiar, and the same in both languages. PCB, or polychlorinated biphenyl, would be easily recognised within the context of a document listing substances, for example, and the same acronym is used in both French and English. No worries there. Often, however, the meanings of the letters that loom out of the shadows are less than clear and my search for a reliable rendering is fruitless. On nights working late, I have paranoid visions of some secret society locked away in some dimly lit, murky basement inventing acronyms, the connotations of which are only intelligible to a chosen few, leaving the rest of us to grope in the dark.

One of the biggest problems is that there is often no way of knowing whether the initials in question were originally conceived in the source or target language, or whether this elusive meaning is used internationally, as is sometimes the case. Sometimes a corresponding acronym does not exist in the language the document is being translated into, and it would be inappropriate to invent one, assuming one had managed to find the meaning of the original in the first place and translated it in full. To make matters worse, clients have varying tastes as to whether they want acronyms changed at all. It is possible to get into a mess.

I have recently been working on specifications for a new electrical installation in a building in a European capital. The initials ASI, which featured throughout the series of files and in French stand for “alimentation sans interruption”, can be translated as UPS (uninterruptable power supply). This was not too difficult to find, and what really helped was that all those collaborating in the translation project made contributions to a collective glossary, thus maximising consistency and saving time for us all.

However, the initials OIBT almost led me into making a grave error. After searching through my usual trusted reference sources – Linguee, ProZ term search, Reverso, WordReference – I came up with what I thought was the corresponding acronym in English, which was ITTO. It was only when checking through after completing the translation that I discovered that these initials actually stand for “International Tropical Timber Organisation”, which obviously didn’t fit the piece I was working on. After further extensive research, it transpired that the letters in this context stand for “l’ordonnance fédérale sur les installations électriques à basse tension” or in English “Federal regulations on low voltage electrical wiring”. Although grateful that I’d spotted this potentially disastrous mistranslation before delivering the completed documents, it still left me with the unanswered problem of how to represent the initials in English. As far as I’m aware, there is no FRLVEW. Even if there is, it probably means something entirely unrelated, which would be completely unhelpful to the person who will eventually have to read this account in order to understand what they have to do – which components to connect up to which, etc.

So what help is available for resolving this problem? The Harrap Business Dictionary provides a number of alphabetically listed meanings for French acronyms with their English counterparts, as does my now becoming battered hardback copy of the Collins Robert bilingual dictionary. My English-Italian Medical Dictionary and Phrasebook by A.H. Zemback offers a few obliging interpretations of abbreviations, for the names of hormones, for example. The acronymfinder.com site is also helpful, as is the acronyms page on thefreedictionary.com. Probably my favourite site is abbreviations.com, which claims to provide “910 acronyms and abbreviations related to the French terminology and jargon”.

Even with all this support, many acronyms manage to remain a mystery. This may be because there are often several alternative explanations for the same initials. For instance, abbreviations.com comes up with no less than 67 different definitions for the initials FSR. Knowing the context of your document obviously narrows the field. So if, let’s say, my document was concerned with electronics, I might be confident in assuming that they meant “Force Sensing Resistor”, whereas “Flight Status Request” would be more likely if the document had been prepared by the military. The fact that one can never be sure of which language the initials are derived from further complicates the issue. These same initials can also be Falange Social Revolucionario in Spanish.
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If anyone reading this has useful advice on this particular skill, I would welcome your suggestions. Until then, this type of code-cracking will always entail a certain amount of guesswork as far as I’m concerned.

My experience of teaching Italian is limited to taking students in years 10 to 12 through the GCSE, tutoring small groups of pupils who simply wanted to learn basic conversation, and teaching adults at evening classes. All of it was very rewarding – but I was taken aback when, about two years ago, I was asked to tutor a child of eight.

As a former secondary school teacher, I hadn't learned the tricks of the trade required to motivate a child of that age, and I have always admired the patience, stamina and dogged determination demanded of a primary teacher on a daily basis. My new pupil, of course, turned out to be adorable. She always brought with her beautifully illustrated books of fairy tales and a pink, My Little Pony pencil case. Her parents, encouraging her to learn as she has extended family in Italy, were as supportive and understanding as they could possibly have been. She had a wonderful sense of humour and she was fun to work with. Yet the striking differences between her and the secondary school pupils I had taught for so long soon became apparent. It was up to me to adapt, and for me that adaptation was a challenge.

It is not simply a question of slowing down the pace, simplifying the material or finding more engaging or colourful activities; after seven hours of being in a classroom, frequently followed by after-school training, events or practices, a year three pupil is tired. Concentration is more difficult and the shorter attention span requires a change of activity more frequently than I had been used to. In addition to this, a secondary school pupil, however disenchanted they might sometimes become, knows on some level that it is ultimately in his or her interests to do a little work to make progress and pass an exam, though they may occasionally lose sight of this goal. To a very young child, however, a term can seem like a lifetime.

My young friend and I had some entertaining lessons. We took all the fruit and vegetables out of the fridge, together with some cuddly toy vegetables collected from our local Co-op, and played shops with some euros I had left over from the holidays. We did word searches, easy crossword puzzles and played guessing games. I made use of the more basic resources on the Languages Online site to help her learn the words for members of the family, pets and colours. In fact, colours and clothes became a favourite topic. She had extensive collections of pencils and felt tips and enjoyed exercises that involved colouring in. We learned how to describe the weather and make a weather map. She liked to “interview” members of her family about their preferences and fill in a questionnaire about their favourite foods. She found it highly amusing that some Italian sentences appeared to read backwards when compared with the English, and would love to read books with pages side-by-side in both languages to hear this, since it sounded so comical to her. Nevertheless, she was learning.

I did run into some problems. In one lesson I tried to teach her to tell the time, only to find out that she had not yet learned to do this in English. I got hold of a speaking calculator and attempted to do a few sums with her and teach her the numbers from one to a hundred, but found that in doing so I was expecting too high a level of arithmetic for that age group. Even reading a story gave rise to an interesting dilemma. I have always had a very structured, hierarchical way of teaching grammar, beginning with the present, moving on to the passato prossimo and imperfetto, then progressing to the future, conditional and finally the subjunctive and passive. (Yes, the gerund tense should fit in there somewhere, I know). My choice of order is based on immediate necessity and level of difficulty. But in an Italian storybook, however young the audience, you are (quite rightly) thrown straight into the passato remoto. This makes sense in view of the fact that it is the “storytelling” tense, or the one that is used for events in the distance past, but it is yet another verb tense to contend with, and can be confusing to a child learning Italian as a second language.

The requirements for the teaching of foreign languages in primary schools, now compulsory from Key Stage 2, are set out on the foreign languages: curriculum requirements page of the Key for School Leaders website, last updated in May 2017.
There is now a broadly itemised programme of study, with skill areas to be covered before the end of Key Stage 2. This can be delivered through any modern or ancient foreign language, which gives each school flexibility, since provision may depend on staffing and location. The British Council points out that this is happening while children are still “confident and curious”, and it publishes the results of the Language Trends Survey carried out in 2015 that showed that the number of primary schools offering foreign languages rose from about 25% to 90% between 2002 and 2010.

The response to the survey, published by the CfBT Education Trust, was largely favourable, with teachers from over 1,200 UK schools taking part. It suggested that – after the move to make the teaching of foreign languages compulsory – many schools successfully made languages an integral part of “education for global citizenship”, a vehicle for developing cultural awareness and compassion in children. There are examples of schools taking a thematic approach, for example by studying sport, history or animals through a language. Many schools clearly felt that learning a foreign language developed transferable skills, which could be used in learning the mother tongue, or used in learning a different language later on.

However, the survey authors list four aspects of foreign language provision in schools that present room for improvement: the need for more staff training in this area; the need for better communication between primary and secondary schools during the transition phase; the problem of some pupils being excluded from learning a foreign language in key stages 3 or 4 in secondary schools, an issue that the authors describe as “elitist” (with schools so frightened by the prospect of dropping places in league tables, it is not surprising that some pupils are discouraged from entering exams in subjects where they are unlikely to achieve good grades); and the ongoing perception that languages are less important than, for example, science or maths. The view that languages are difficult, while not necessarily offering the same career prospects as other subjects, is also mentioned in the report.

While these four problems are all worrying, it is perhaps the second that strikes a chord with me on a personal level. During my years of teaching in secondary schools, I often heard colleagues in the language department voice concerns about how pupils entered the school with such a varied range of experience in French that teaching the children as a class was often problematic. Some pupils have to switch languages altogether, having studied something at Key Stage 2 that was not offered at their secondary school. Some of the problems I experienced with my young Italian student could have been avoided by better communication between myself and her school. I am happy to admit I made a mistake in not realising this earlier.

But the fourth issue is also deeply worrying. Even now, I still hear people say openly that “we don’t need to learn foreign languages, as everyone speaks English”. There is a need to fundamentally alter perceptions here.
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I believe strongly in foreign language teaching for primary school children, but it needs to be done fairly and consistently, with clear guidelines as to which grammar and vocabulary is taught. There is a certain vagueness about the specification as it stands. Bold though this move by the government was, we will only make real progress if it is properly valued and properly funded, with an appropriate level of training for teachers, and investment in not only recruitment but retention (teachers are leaving the profession at an alarming rate). Government also needs to convince pupils, parents and staff that foreign languages are an asset that will become increasingly vital to our students and their futures as global citizens, employed in jobs we cannot yet imagine, communicating and travelling more extensively than any generation before them. We cannot simply keep viewing foreign languages as an optional extra.
 
 

A friend of mine hoping to start working as a translator recently completed his first project for a paying customer. He then met with an unexpected obstacle: when the translation had been approved and he tried to request payment for the work, he was told that such payment could only be made upon receipt of an ‘official invoice’. What, he asked me, did this mean?

This blog is intended to help anyone who finds themselves in this position, and to provide details of what should be included.

A variety of invoice templates can be found on the internet, and in fact there is probably an extensive choice of readily adaptable blanks if you click on File > New in WORD, along with a selection of templates for business cards, flyers, brochures, inventories, receipts and anything else you are likely to need. However, your own design may prove more useful. This means you can be creative and personalise your invoices, and make the page layout look presentable, although I feel that as well as providing all the information that is essential to your clients, your invoices are vital to your own record-keeping, and the content is therefore more important than a flashy and colourful page. There is going to be much more detail on your invoice than on the quick, hand-written invoices scribbled by my garage mechanic for a new exhaust, for example, efficient and organised though he is.

I should mention here that some companies make invoicing easy and convenient by setting up a one-click process on their platform or site, whilst others have very strict guidelines as to what is required. However, I would strongly advise you to adapt or design a generic invoice template, which provides headings to columns, your details etc., and save this where it is easily retrieved. Specifics can be added at the appropriate time. An invoice folder is also very helpful. This way you can keep track of all the work you have completed, when it was done, who for and what the document was about. Should an invoice go missing after being sent – which can sometimes happen – you can also find and resend it without searching around your computer.

Whatever information you choose to provide, I recommend that the following details are clearly stated on all your invoices: -

• Your name, address, company name, logo (where appropriate) and contact details. (This makes it easier for the client to identify you, process the payment and file the invoice away.)
• Client name, address and contact details.
• Name of the individual within the organisation who approached you, spoke to you or took delivery of the translated document. (This means that if there is any query over the payment you can speak to the relevant person.)
• Invoice number. (It is helpful to number your invoices and keep a separate “Summary of Projects” file. You then have an at-a-glance record of all projects, dates, payments made and payments outstanding.)
• Brief description of work and/or client project code. (If you have been working on various projects for several weeks, you may forget which translation was which, and who for, and if somewhere down the line there is follow-up, feedback or comeback on a project or payment, or further additions to be made, you need to be able to work out which one it was.)
• The date the translation was due and the date of delivery. (This will make it clear to the client which period you are invoicing for.)
• The date the invoice was sent, and the date the payment is due.
• The rate you are charging per word/per hour.
• Details of any discounts you are offering or granting.
• The total amount to be paid for each project.
• The total amount due for that month. (Charging for all projects completed during a single month on the same invoice is less hassle for you and less processing for the accountant receiving it. One invoice per project – unless this is specifically required by the customer -  seems time-consuming and unnecessarily complicated.)
• Your bank details, which must include the bank sort code and account number. If the customer is based overseas, which will often be the case, they will also need an IBAN number and BIC number. These can be obtained from your bank if required. (Be aware that your bank may levy charges if you are receiving money in another currency in a bank account in sterling.  If you regularly receive payment in euros, it may be advisable to open a separate, euro bank account to avoid these charges. It is worth discussing international transfers and multi-currency banking with your bank so that you can open the most suitable account for you. Note that some banks make a monthly charge on business accounts, irrespective of currency. Shopping around is time well-spent.) Some translators and some customers prefer to transfer or receive money by PayPal, which is a safe and reliable option and straight-forward to use.

 
Unless otherwise requested, I make a habit of sending out invoices on the last day of the month, or the last Friday if the last day falls during a weekend. However, creating all your invoices on the same morning would be a laborious process and you may find that you are too busy. It’s much easier to generate them as you go along, after each project has been delivered. Then, at the end of the month, all you have to do is add up the total charge for each client and send the invoice with a short friendly covering email.
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Remember that customers may not always be in a position to pay you until they have been paid themselves, particularly if there is a chain involved, in which case everyone waits for the end-client. Accounts departments may have many invoices to process and each payment will require authorisation. My policy is to allow customers a full calendar month to pay, this being counted from the date of delivery of the invoice. This means that there can be almost 2 months between completing and delivering a document and being paid for it, but this is more realistic and relaxed than demanding payment too soon. Most companies have their own payment terms, although there are varying degrees of transparency in this area.

If two weeks elapse after a due date and the invoice has not yet been settled, I find that a polite email with a gentle reminder is usually all that is necessary to obtain the payment. Sometimes a little patience is necessary; it is very rare that someone is deliberately trying to avoid paying, and giving the benefit of the doubt is probably the best way forward. Some direct customers prefer to get the payment out of the way as soon as they receive the document. Thanking people for paying early, or repeatedly on time, shows that you appreciate their efficiency and would be happy to work with them again.

Finally, to avoid confusion and complete the record-keeping procedure, I like to mark down each payment on my “Summary of Projects” sheet, and file all paid invoices in a separate place from the others. This seems tedious, but in this matter organisation is essential. In those very busy times when projects are flying towards you quicker than you can comfortably handle them all, it is easy to forget to take these steps. And however much you enjoy the work, you deserve to be paid for it. When creating, storing, updating and sending invoices, a methodical approach means that no payments are forgotten. 

​Although I've been a translator for a few years now, and rewriting documents in English has become second nature, I still get a little anxious when someone speaks rapid Italian to me over the phone. It’s harder to follow a dialogue when you can’t see someone’s face. This is the main reason I booked an intensive course at the Istituto di Venezia Italian language school, an organisation based in both Venice and the beautiful city of Trieste - where I stayed for a week in July. The school offers Italian classes for beginners and improvers of all levels. It also provides guided excursions and activities, such as cooking lessons, in the late afternoons, and students are encouraged to accept accommodation in an Italian family, to experience full immersion in the language.

I chose the Trieste school because it’s in a region of Italy I hadn’t visited before and I’d heard positive things about the city. I wasn’t disappointed. Due to its location at the northern end of the Adriatic Sea, its proximity to Austria, Hungary, Slovenia and Croatia, and its accessibility by train to many European cities, I really felt at the heart of Europe, at a crossroads of cultures and languages.

My edition of Italian Grammar for Dummies, by Bartolini-Salimbeni, from the Wiley Brand series, calls them “the unruly children in Italian”, being “ever present, unpredictable, and idiosyncratic”. The book goes on to explain that they are “small words with big impact”, and cites one or two examples of this:

In Italian, the word “in” can mean to, at or in. eg “sono in ufficio” (I’m at the office), “lavoro in giardino” (I’m working in the garden) and “vado in Italia” (I’m going to Italy). The author even likens them to chameleons, changing their meaning according to their surroundings. Broadly speaking, their function is to indicate place, eg “sotto” (under, or beneath) and “su” (over, or above), but they also link nouns with adjectives, verbs or other nouns, and they can sometimes give rise to a disconcerting ambiguity.

For those of us who quite enjoy memorising information by rote, almost any other aspect of grammar can be learned by grasping a few rules. Committing verb tables to memory, whether in the past, present, future, conditional tenses etc., can be rewarding, and assimilating them will rapidly expand your versatility when using a language. Similarly, adverbs and adjectives, together with their agreements, follow a few manageable rules. But the logical approach of attempting to decode and utilise a pattern of behaviour will get you nowhere when it comes to these.

I refer, of course, to prepositions, and if anything is going to steer a translator towards a grammatical blunder, it’s these. We can be so focussed on unravelling the meaning of the constituent phrases of a lengthy sentence, we can often miss these tiny pitfalls, with potentially disastrous consequences and even possible mistranslation of the point the writer intended to make.

Thus “una bottiglia da vino rosso” might be hastily read as “a bottle of red wine”, which would have been “una bottiglia di vino rosso”, with the former structure meaning “a red wine bottle”, ie a bottle used to carry red wine. In fact, the word da in Italian, has multiple meanings: it can indicate function “una camera da letto” (bedroom); the word 'from' - “siamo da Londra” (we’re from London); or 'since' - “sono qui da ieri” (I have been here since yesterday); unexpectedly 'to' - “vado dal [= da+il] macellaio” (I’m going to the butcher), and many others, too numerous to list here. A similar array of possible meanings could be assigned to other prepositions, such as di or a. In Italian, there is the added complication that, as in the last example, the preposition often becomes preposition plus article. This clips and tidies up the phrase somewhat, since “in la cucina” (in the kitchen) becomes “nella cucina”, thus avoiding a clumsy consonant clutter.

Then there is the problem of which preposition is the correct one to follow a verb. Eg “ha deciso di proseguire” (he decided to proceed) but “comincio a lavorare” (I start working). These, I’m afraid, you just have to memorise separately. There does not appear to be any logical reason for the choice of one over another.

These problems are not limited to Italian.

…in Spanish, it can sometimes be difficult to know the difference between "por" and "para". Both can mean "for", but also sometimes "by", "through", "to", etc.
An example:
"Te di dinero por tu colección"
"Te di dinero para tu colección"
Both can be translated as: "I gave you money for your collection". But they actually have very different meanings.
"Por" is used when discussing exchanges - so the first phrase means "I gave you money in exchange for your collection".
"Para" is used to denote destination. So, the second phrase means "I gave you money for/to add to your collection".

Let’s now look at some examples in French sentences.

There is the possibility of an ambiguous use of “pour”:
"Pour elle, il faudrait partir en voiture". This could mean (for her sake, we should go by car), but could equally be interpreted as (in her opinion, we should go by car).
 
In the following example, “by” could be translated by two different French prepositions, giving rise to two meanings:
Au programme, le concerto pour piano de Tchaikovsky (...written by Tchaikovsky)
Au programme, le concerto pour piano par Alfred Brendel (...played by Brendel)

Now look at this source of confusion when translating “for”:
Il est là depuis une semaine (he arrived a week ago)
Il est là pour une semaine (he will leave in a week)

When translating “with”:
J'ai passé mes vacances chez des amis (I spent my holidays at my friends’ house)
J'ai passé mes vacances avec des amis (I spent my holidays with friends)

And when translating “in”:
Il a fait le travail en deux heures (he did the job in two hours)
Il fera le travail dans deux heures (he will complete the job within two hours)
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All this confirms the importance of checking a completed document or story as a whole. Reading it back, ensuring that it makes sense, is essential to avoid misleading readers. Ideally, this would be done by someone else with an outside perspective, but if contracts and non-disclosure agreements will not permit this, then “sleeping” on the problem and returning to it with a fresh view the following day can often provide new insight into intended meaning. This, of course, is one of the reasons I’m not a fan of same-day work. Writing and translation is precarious and delicate work. Rushing is risky. Such a pity that the pressures to work in haste at all costs can result in a potential loss of quality.
 
 

 
After the pre-requisite, peripheral vision test and the one where they fire puffs of air onto the surface of your eyes, my last appointment at Specsavers – an organisation I’ve always admired for its, in my opinion, high standards of customer care, accuracy and value for money – involved the usual questions I’ve never learned the answers to: “What’s the lowest line you can read?”, “Which are clearer, the circles on the red background or the green?”, and my personal favourite - “Are the letters clearer with this lens…..?.. or this one….?.. this lens….?.. or this one….?”. I’m always at a loss, but this time I had no idea what to say to any of these.

The main reason for my uncertainty was that, after days of working at my computer, with stretches of up to 12 hours to complete lengthy projects, the letters were beginning to appear delocalised; words were swimming around the screen instead of remaining in their rightful place within the document. My higher than usual work volume during April was also the reason why there was no blog for that month. The thing is, once I get started, I find it difficult to stop until I’ve completed the amount of work I'm determined to get done for that day, even taking drinks and snacks while typing. This, as well as probably being counterproductive from an ergonomics point of view, is bad news for the eyes.

As the optician moved on to updating my details on the database, there came the inevitable question: “How many hours a day do you spend at the computer?” This varies, but it can be an alarmingly large number.

Of course, this problem is not specific to translators, and anyone working all day at a computer might experience this phenomenon. But if you are using a CAT tool, with the source language displayed on the left and the target language on the right, you are likely to be working in a rather small font size. As my sympathetic optician pointed out, one of the biggest problems for eyes on a computer screen is that straining to concentrate on information often means reading for long periods without blinking, since to do so might mean losing your place in the text. This can result in lack of (or insufficient) irrigation for the eyes. For those of us who wear contact lenses all or some of the time, tired eyes may also exacerbate problems of redness, soreness or itching. According to my optician, lenses with high gas permeability can require more lubrication, so a failure to blink may mean insufficient hydration. The lens can trap a layer of fluid between itself and the eyeball, which sounds helpful, but isn’t actually solving the problem. As well as being necessary for clear vision, one of the functions of tears and the tear film is to wash away foreign matter, so there’s greater susceptibility to infection if the eye is too dry.

As a result of this appointment, I had a fresh new pair of lenses, swiftly delivered, with a new prescription that should have given me better vision and renewed comfort. But I found that distant car number plates were slightly out of focus, close reading was difficult and I was getting dizzy spells and unreal feelings. Only after few days’ rest did my sight return to normal.

Specsavers lists potential eye strain problems and suggest solutions to these on its website. This advice includes periodically looking away from the computer screen to focus on objects in the distance, in order to relax the muscles responsible for focussing, and taking frequent breaks from the work. There are obvious concentration advantages to doing this, aside from those concerning the eyes. In addition to this, here are a few other tips I received from the member of staff who tested me:

• Try to keep blinking as often as feels natural; don’t read entire paragraphs without closing   your eyes, at the expense of comfort.
• Use moisturising eyedrops. These help to alleviate dryness and wash away foreign bodies.
• Keep items likely to come into contact with the eyes, such as spectacles, lenses, hands, tissues or eye makeup, as clean as possible.
• If you use eye makeup, make sure it’s ophthalmologist tested and discard after the recommended shelf life.
• Drink plenty of water. This helps to eliminate excess salt from the body and reduce eye strain.
• Have regular check-ups.
• My optician also mentioned the importance of a healthy diet in maintaining good eye health and avoiding certain age-related eye diseases, including macular degeneration and cataracts, a claim that is reinforced on the All About Vision website. Very colourful vegetables and fruits, we are told, are rich in antioxidants and vitamins, which can help to protect the eyes from sight-damaging conditions.

Many of us depend on maintaining good eyesight to do our jobs, and such advice is invaluable. It’s worth doing a little research to find out the most appropriate and realistic way of working these measures into our schedules. Eye health is not something we can afford to jeopardise.
 

 
Many self-employed translators will recognise the dilemma: it gets to 6pm on a Friday and the phone rings. An urgent translation deliverable at 9am on Monday morning. I do a quick mental calculation as I go over what I’m already doing that weekend, and try to make a decision. Is it a good excuse not to do the ironing, or will I have to cancel my entire Saturday plans?
 
For those of us who work for ourselves - or perhaps more accurately, for several clients at once - the business world can feel unpredictable. Projects tend to come in clusters, with slow, sometimes stationary, periods in between. While some deadlines afford a comfortable length of time to work at a moderate pace, very often speed is the priority. Turnaround can be required overnight, or even later that day.
 
In my most hectic times, when three requests arrive in one afternoon, I often work late into the night. I don’t mind this too much: it’s tranquil, the phone is unlikely to ring and my inbox goes quiet. Working in the evening is peaceful, and I can go at my own pace without interruption. But I sometimes get booked up for lengthy periods, and I don’t like disappointing clients if they want something in a hurry.
 
While I’m still working out how to tackle the busy times, I can offer a few pointers.
 

• Don’t reply to group emails, unless you really want the work. You can usually assume that if the email is not directed at you, they’ll find someone else.
• Always ask the word count and the type of work: if it’s a small project, you may be able to squeeze it in, but it’s important to know what you’re agreeing to do.
• Before saying no to new projects, try to negotiate the deadline. Even if your client insists on a quick turnaround and you have to decline, they’ll know you want to work with them in future.
• Remember to take breaks. It’s too easy to squint at a computer screen for hours a day when you’re immersed in a project. Go for a walk, catch up on the news, get enough sleep.

 
There are also times when the tap is turned off and it all comes to a standstill. This can be a good opportunity to catch up the things that get neglected during the busy times. A chance to:
 

• Delete files that are cluttering up your laptop, or allow your computer to perform updates.
• Update your profile on your website, social media and other sites you may be registered with.
• Reply to messages that have gone unanswered for a while.
• Catch up with your invoicing, or do admin tasks such as updating your invoice template, or sending out gentle reminders to clients who are late to make payments.

 
Now that I’ve been doing this for a while, I am beginning to notice a pattern emerging over the course of the calendar year. Midsummer tends to be busy, while it can take time to build momentum in the new year, as many companies do not start new projects in December or January. On this basis, I can plan my time effectively, taking care to ensure maximum availability in July and August, and booking holidays in the quieter times. Above all, don't lose heart if two or three days go by and you don't hear anything. There are busy time around the corner.
 
If you are reading this and have found yourself in a similar position, please do leave a comment or get in touch through my contact form. I would very much like to hear how others go about tackling the feast and famine aspect of the translation workload.

This was one of the questions I was confronted with – and spectacularly unprepared for – during my French oral exam in the final year of my joint honours degree course in Modern Languages. It came after I’d stammered and trembled through the rest of the ordeal, completed my verbal presentation on Molière’s Le Malade Imaginaire, and made a supreme effort to disregard the scribblings of my interrogator on the paper on his clipboard, the penetrating stare and the should-have-been-comforting-but-somehow-disconcerting nod of his silent colleague in the corner by the recording device.

I’d seen it before of course, during my many years of teaching. The ghastly white and almost green pallor on the terrified faces of the poor year 11 oral exam candidates waiting for the torture chamber, seated in a corridor as I passed on my way to the stationery cupboard and struggled in vain to squeeze out a reassuring smile, their fists clutching a selection of allowable jottings on pastel revision cards, as if clinging to a lifeline.

It’s not that I was unprepared due to lack of effort or prior knowledge of the format of the trial. I knew vaguely what to expect. I would be shut in a waiting room with a script, asked to digest it, in spite of stomach-churning lack of appetite, then once inside the abattoir, to read it out, or rather read out the sections I could decipher on a piece of paper quivering with anguish, then answer questions on it, proceed with my presentation, then submit to further questioning. The lack of preparedness rather came from the unpredictability. I had no idea what their precise method of slaughter was going to consist of, and this question rather took me by surprise.

It sounded simple and obvious, and I blurted out something to do with a good translation being one that reproduced exactly what had been written in the source language. How naïve I must have sounded. Only later did I come to understand just how much more to this there is.

Perhaps one of the biggest obstacles to providing a succinct answer to this question is the subjective nature of translation work. In their student textbook “Thinking French Translation”, Sándor Harvey and Ian Higgins are keen to emphasise that they are not offering inflexible rules or recipes that apply to all, but that they urge the translator to recognise options and alternatives, take responsibility for identifying target audience needs, requirements of those commissioning the project, genre type, style and register, and use this information to choose a specific strategy. They are right. Thus, attributes that might be regarded as constituting a good translation of a financial document, which would probably include tables of figures necessitating accuracy and presentation, would be important in a literary text, but perhaps not the highest or only priority. Sometimes my customers simply want to understand what is written in a document so they can act on it; others are presenting a translation as a PowerPoint, in which case the formatting and page layout become important. A legal contract, on the other hand, must be unambiguous.

Many translators stick to what they do best and become specialised in one particular type of text: legal, business, journalistic, film subtitling, medical, technical and literature, to name a few. Each would have its own definition of what is meant by good translation.

In “The Right Angle”, Barron, Cockerham, Dawson and Smith write of “sharing what the author saw when writing the passage” and “detecting the niceties of expression”. They go on to state that a translator needs to be as good a writer in both languages as the authors whose work is being translated, before finally admitting that “the task is an impossible one”. Later in the same chapter they talk about how there will always be a hidden part of the author’s vision that we cannot share, or communicate in the target language. We can, as they correctly claim, only aspire.

And in her publication “In Other Words”, included on the recommended reading list for both my BA and translation training courses, Mona Baker explores the claim made by some that translation is an impossible task, “doomed to failure” due to lack of similarity between languages and the concept that reality doesn’t exist outside language. She also reminds us that, despite this, translation has “built bridges of understanding... among different societies”, that it is a necessary process bringing different cultural and linguistic backgrounds closer together.

Back to the original question. It is easy to see why there is a temptation to define translation quality in terms of its problems, or at least the ways in which they are overcome. If I were faced with this question again I would have both a long and a short answer. The longer one would involve bullet-pointing the essential qualities of the end product. This, after all, is what is seen:

• It conveys the author’s intended meaning as closely as possible.
• The tone, nuance and mood of the author have been mirrored. This, of course, is most important in literary texts.
• It reads fluently and coherently, as though it had been written in the target language originally. It “sounds” natural.
• It contains no omissions. Nor has the translator made additions that were not there in the source.
• It contains no errors of spelling, grammar, punctuation or syntax.
• It is adapted for its target audience. Choice of language is appropriate to the level of reading ability of those receiving the work.
• Where equivalence is impossible, for example in puns, plays on words or idiomatic speech, the translator has researched extensively to find the most appropriate phrase or expression.
• It should, and this is where things get a little murky, be clear and comprehensible, no matter how badly written the original. Sentence length varies enormously from one language to another and this must be taken into consideration.
• It is set out with due attention to the page layout and formatting, which should match the original as exactly as possible.

[I feel compelled to include this last point, since translation is often carried out for consumer-oriented purposes as well as academic ones, and this is often among the highest priorities to customers.]

I agree with what Bill Zart writes in the language blog: “It is an intricate and often subjective process that goes far beyond a simplistic word-for-word exchange.”

I often find that, when customers have attempted their own translation and want it checked, they can be surprised to learn that simply choosing the English word that sounds the closest to the one in their language will not do. Thus, in Italian, the word “attuale”, which means “current”, “present”, or “ongoing”, cannot be translated by “actual”.

Even here, with this checklist of impossible dreams (I wonder how many translations actually tick all those boxes), I am being too formulaic. Translation isn’t mechanistic.

My short answer would be “the work of Lucia Graves”. I have just finished reading “The Angel’s Game”, translated from the original Spanish novel by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, having read “The Shadow of the Wind” and “The Prince of Mist” last year. Despite starting the first page while relaxing on a beach under an intense East African sun, I was plunged, within two paragraphs, into mid-winter in an industrial, early twentieth century Barcelona, amid the factories and chimneys that the author tells us cast a permanent darkness and redness over the city, so compelling and vivid is the text and imagery. Rarely have I been happy to sacrifice so much sleep over a book, and rarely have I felt more concern for the fate of a central character. Rarely have I read until the early hours, gripped by the horror of rapidly-moving events, periodically lowering my book to check that the eyes of the villain were not peering at me through the gloom of my own bedroom. I won’t quote the breath-taking, beautiful descriptions and dialogues that fill this outstanding book, doubling my reading speed and awakening a spectrum of emotions: fear, anxiety, sorrow, momentary relief, hope, despair. It must be sampled first hand. But it raises another question in my mind: does a truly great translation arise, initially, from a truly well-written source? There is no doubt that Zafón has achieved worldwide, and much deserved, success, and there is no doubt that it is easier to work from a good quality source text, and surely it can be argued that an excellent source text is one component in the production of a great product. Translating his books must have been fascinating work.

I need to stress, however, that I am in no way failing to acknowledge the obvious skill and dedication of Lucia Graves, and no amount of quality in the original could compensate for a poor translation. I am moved by her achievements. The daughter of the English poet and novelist, Robert Graves, Lucia Graves has translated and written numerous books, working in Spanish, Catalan and English. I feel that her work comes as close to meeting all of the criteria I’ve seen about what makes a good translation as anything I’ve ever read. I don’t translate literature, as my specialism is scientific, medical and pharmaceutical work, but to anyone aspiring to be a translator of literary text, I’d say that hers is the standard to aspire to. To go back to Mona Baker’s bridge of understanding, how wonderful that someone is talented enough to enable us to share the mood of so great an author. If bridges are being built, Lucia Graves’s bridge must be among the strongest.

The recently released science fiction film Arrival got me thinking. The protagonist, linguistics professor Louise Banks, played by Amy Adams, attempts to communicate with aliens who have landed on earth. She strives to decode the smoky, circular symbols they write on a screen, and finds that as her understanding grows, the structure of this new language alters her perception of the concept of time.

This is, of course, fiction. But there are very real theories – referenced in Arrival – about how learning a new language can re-wire your way of thinking and make you see things differently.

According to Medical Daily, learning a language can build new neural pathways inside the brain. A study carried out in Switzerland, meanwhile, measured the thickness of the cerebral cortex before and after three months of intensive foreign language training on the part of interpreters. The cortex contains a layer of neurons that deal with memory and thought, and thus the learning of language. The researchers discovered an increase in cortical thickness in some parts of the brain, as well as an increase in the volume of the hypothalamus – the section of the brain responsible for hormone production. It is believed that an increase in cortex thickness can improve memory and may even result in clearer thinking in old age.

But can learning a new language change the way we see the world? There is evidence to suggest that it can. Psycholinguists at the University of Lancaster have documented research into the linguistic differences that affect the way English and German speakers – and bilinguals – interpret events. They point out that English grammar provides a means of locating occurrences within a particular timeframe, while the German language makes less provision for this. The result is that someone speaking in German might specify a start, middle and end to an event, which is not necessary in English. One might simply say “a woman was walking along a busy road, when...”.
The researchers theorise that this may affect the way in which the event itself is interpreted. Their research suggests that German speakers focus more on possible outcomes, while English speakers focus more on actions. What's more, the researchers found that the perspectives of bilingual people involved in the same experiment appeared to change depending on the language in which they were being tested.

This could mean that our interpretation of what's around us depends on the linguistic tools we use to describe and record observation. This is certainly my experience when it comes to speaking Italian, where sentences often run backwards relative to English ones, and with much less punctuation. For me, this results in conscious thought about what the key object or message is, since this must often come at the end of the sentence.

Federico Prandi, writing on the language learning site Babbel, takes this a stage further, claiming, and even complaining, that being bilingual has caused him to develop two differing personalities.
Prandi explains that his Italian-speaking and English-speaking selves are two very different individuals. One example he gives to illustrate this involves the way he behaves at parties: sociable, funny and “close to having sober fun” at an English-speaking party, but “careful not to make eye contact with strangers” at an Italian-speaking gathering. He says his words sound “tremendously heavy and strangely out of place”, despite having grown up in Italy.

Prandi also shares details of an experiment carried out on Japanese women living in the US in the 1960s. Asked the same questions in both languages, most of the subjects responded with far more openness and confidence when speaking English, whilst their answers were more cautious and guarded when replying in Japanese.

I can fully understand this. When speaking French in France, or Italian in Italy, I feel a sense of freedom and expansiveness that I rarely experience in my native English, despite the greater restriction on choice of vocabulary that is inevitable when using a second language. I enjoy focusing on the choice of words and sentence construction as ends in themselves, rather than how my intended meaning is going to be perceived or accepted by others. I am less concerned with what others are thinking of me, less self-conscious and infinitely more at ease. 

This is the blog post I’ve been putting off. The one suggested to me well over a year ago when I handed in my notice at my last school and first had this website created. It’s a deeply personal blog, not easy to write. It makes sense to have waited all this time, to have had the chance to reflect on the answer to this question, and whether I made the right choice.

First, I need to say that I loved teaching. Oh, not the phone calls and emails, the endless documentation, the meetings for the sake of meetings, the initiatives carved out to provide someone with CV material that dragged everyone else on board at the same time. Not that part, but being in the classroom, participating in someone else’s progress and development, being there to share the moment when someone first grasps something new, or something complex, sharing time with youngsters who are genuinely interested, or passionate about achieving good results. Teaching is a profoundly collaborative process, and I can’t imagine a more rewarding job. For many years, I woke up eager to get to work.

So why did I quit? It's actually because I felt I wasn’t making full use of my own training and development. Although I enjoyed teaching science, and all the other things I did as part of working in a school (French exchanges, activity weeks, fundraising activities, directing or co-directing the school play), I reached a stage where I needed a fresh challenge. I began to reflect on what I would study if I were young again: it was, without a doubt, French and Italian. I had already begun to take evening classes in beginners and then intermediate Italian, and after a while, due to the lack of available teachers, I found that the only way to continue studying that beautiful language was to start a distance learning course with a college in Edinburgh. This led to my taking Scottish Highers in the two languages, and eventually a full BA course with Royal Holloway, University of London.
With a full time job and three kids, my friends thought I was mad. But it wasn’t like work. I read the books for the literature part of the course in bed at night, wrote essays and did the reading comprehensions and translations during school holidays, or while on holiday, and, little by little, over a six-year period, I completed the degree.

The problem with that was I then felt the urge to use it. I wanted to teach French or Italian, and did, several classes a week, for a few years. Young people are remarkably adaptable and resilient, and none of my pupils found it particularly odd that someone who had taught them French in year 9 was now standing at the front of the A Level Chemistry lab. If they did, they were at least too polite to say so. But schools need science teachers, and my rainbow timetable (of, at one point, Chemistry, Physics, French and Italian) was short-lived.

Unable to settle back into teaching purely science, I spent a year and a half giving serious thought to how I could use the learning I had acquired over the previous decade. No matter how much I enjoyed working with my students, I grew restless.

I hit upon translation. I find this kind of work fascinating, and love solving the puzzle of working out how a message can be restated in another language. I am always delighted to receive and set to work on a new translation, and equally pleased to be able to deliver it on time. But the main benefit is that I am now finally using each part of my background. Much of my work is medical and pharmaceutical, although documents relating to manufacturing, scientific research or tourist information come up quite often too. I am using both language and scientific knowledge, which is very satisfying.

A student I taught in my final year of teaching sent me an email recently, to tell me his exam results. He added that he hoped my new work would “be the change I was looking for”. I seriously hope none of my ex-students felt I needed a change from them. I miss being in the classroom very much. In fact, from January 2017 I will be spending one day a week teaching children who are absent from school due to long-term illness, in addition to my translation work.
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So to anyone who asks me if I made the right choice, the answer is yes. I am very happy working as a translator of scientific material. But if I’m asked if I miss teaching then I must be honest. I miss it terribly, and can’t allow myself to think about it for too long. As for the hundreds and hundreds of pupils I taught over the years, how I wish I could tell them that they were a true pleasure to work with, and wish them every success.