What was your first translation?

Dmitry

your first translation
Hey friends!

Our friends from SDL has published an article to celebrate the International Translation Day. In this article they featured 12 translators who shared their stories about their first translation. I was one of those translators ? And I think @vertaaltnu and @RusTranPro was featured too.

I really liked the article and I was wondering what's your first translation looked like? Was it hard? Were you scared? Did you proofread it like maniac? ?

Feel free to share your stories below. ?

PaulWilliamDixon

Can't remember if it was my first translation but it was well before I took up the profession. I was a Maths teacher at the time.
The mother of one of my students met an American in Rio, at traffic lights, and fell in love at first sight. The problem was that she spoke no English and he spoke no Portuguese. So she would bring the love letters she received to my house and I would translate them for her. Then she would write replies, I would translate them back into English, she would copy them in her handwriting and send them back to him in the States. I did if for free because we were good friends.
This went on for some months - then she said that they were getting married. They now live somewhere in Pennsylvania.

eleonorang

PaulWilliamDixon This is so romantic! You should be so happy to have had the chance to bring people closer with your work ? It might have been your first translation but it's like you reached the apex of our profession!

My first translation work involved general psychology articles from English into Italian, it wasn't that dense with specific terminology but I did review it like a maniac ? I can still remember how exciting it was ?

DmitrySavin

Good question ? I think, my first translation (not professional) was... I guess it was dialogs in old Sega games (a console ? SNES), but more complete things were World of Warcraft lore articles, first one was about Dragon Aspects. Some of them are still on fan forums, we even started to create Russian version of lore database and soon official Russian WoW came out ?

We also made our Russian Warcraft 2 units voiceover and even recorded it with our voices back in early 2000s ?

PaulWilliamDixon - amazing story!

ClaudiaBefu

Teresa even the dreaded translations we did in high school from Latin and Greek were fun for me

God, we hated those in school! ?

DmitrySavin We also made our Russian Warcraft 2 units voiceover and even recorded it with our voices back in early 2000s

That rocks! I have a funny story about a voiceover actor: when I was travelling to Hong Kong some years ago, I met the man who did the English voiceover of Bruce Lee. He was awesome at 80! ?

eleonorang My first translation work involved general psychology articles from English into Italian

How did you get this job? It sounds really interesting.

PaulWilliamDixon So she would bring the love letters she received to my house and I would translate them for her.

This is so romantic. You helped two people fall in love... ?

Teresa

@PaulWilliamDixon This was epic!
My story is nowhere near as remarkable, I'm afraid ? the first translation work I did (if we leave out when I tried to translate the 6th Harry Potter book for myself because I couldn't wait for the Italian version to come out...) was for a small food and wine company in my city, they needed someone to translate marketing research from English/German to Italian, and to translate some of their product descriptions...needless to say, I was hooked! Actually, I had always been interested in translation, even the dreaded translations we did in high school from Latin and Greek were fun for me ? those were probably the early warning signs.

PaulWilliamDixon

Teresa You translated from Latin and Greek - I'm impressed!
Are you from Italy? Ho studiato l'italiano per due anni, nel quartiere italiano a San Paolo. Allora possiamo scrivere in italiano...
I also studied Japanese for six months - but just conversation and the katakana, no writing.

ClaudiaBefu

My first gig was actually interpreting. I was looking for a job after high school, and I landed in a fashion factory ran by an English couple. All their staff was Romanian. So there I was, helping the CMO make herself understood... I learned a great deal about tailoring, sawing, fabrics and what it means working late at night, for weeks in a row, to be able to deliver a clothing line on time. It was a lot of fun! ?

ClaudiaBefu

PaulWilliamDixon Cool! What other languages did you study? And from which ones do you translate?

eleonorang

ClaudiaBefu How did you get this job? It sounds really interesting.

A friend of mine knew a student who was supposed to graduate at the Psychology faculty and needed the translation of those articles to get a grasp of what was in them. So yeah, word of mouth strikes again ?

cariobana

The first translation I was paid for was epic: 500 pages, Portuguese into English. It was a grant request from a Brazilian University to the Kellogg Foundation. A friend of mine got the project and invited me to assist her. It was a combination sight translation/translation/proofing/editing. We took turns dictating the material straight from the Portuguese text into English to one another (this was before voice-to-text recognition and we used a typewriter with no memory) when we happened to be together; other times we would work alone either translating of proofing/editing the other's work.

That's how I became officially a translator. That was April, 1980.

eleonorang

@cariobana It's amazing how linguistic services evolved! As a millennial I have never known translation as it was before computers, the Internet and CAT tools came along, but I can tell the way a translator worked was quite different ?

alyonaxl8

My first ever translation was a Harry Potter fanfic xDD The first translation I got paid for was not so exciting- it was the Articles of Association of a Cyprus company, I believe.

@PaulWilliamDixon Your story is really amazing!

amirsalr

My first translation was a manual of disposable tableware system. Payment was exciting.

ShouguangCao

amirsalr yes, I don't remember my first paid translation job but I do remember when I was still in university, a friend gave me a tiny job of translating a birth certificate, and the payment was very good! I never repeated that experience again and it remained to be my best paid translation job ever.

Gentiana

My first job was actually interpreting. I was still studying at the faculty of foreign languages and I was hired as an interpreter for Council of Europe during local elections in my country in 1996. It was a wonderful experience ?