Since last year, all of us at Beyond Words have worked hard to provide a fun and useful resource for language lovers and professionals.
In between the fun language articles, we occasionally offer advice on how to become a professional translator, and we try to deliver some context on the history of translation, as well as some of the trials and tribulations that translators face.
If you are thinking about embarking on a translation career, we’d like to offer this new series as a useful reference.
Paths to Success in Translation
The Paths to Success series will serve you interviews with professional translators, guides to the best schools and certification programs, and advice for translators at every level. We hope you enjoy it, and find it useful.
With this first of our Paths to Success interviews, we turn to Mary C. Maloof-Fleck for her point of view on what it takes to make a successful translation career. (Hint: In Mary’s case, it has already involved the State Department, wine, dental surgery and a particularly surly gang member.)
Mary translates Spanish, French, and Portuguese into English. She resides in Atlanta, Georgia, United States. With 15 years of experience in the language services industry, she is the founder and moderator of SpTranslators, an extremely popular Yahoo! Group for Spanish translators, as well as the founder and moderator of Legaltranslators, a Yahoo! Group for legal translators of all languages.
As a child, Mary, who is of Lebanese descent, surprised her parents by choosing to study Spanish instead of Arabic because she felt inexplicably drawn to the Spanish language and Latin culture. Although she was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, she has traveled extensively throughout Western Europe, and lived in Madrid, Paris, and Washington, D.C. before embarking on her translation career. She is an accomplished classical pianist and has even been known to sing at a club or two!
Without further ado, we give you Mary Maloof-Fleck on paths to a successful translation career:
Why did you become a translator and what path did you take to get to this point in your career?
Originally, in college and in my early twenties, I never wanted to become a translator, and in fact, had never even considered that career path. I had actually been dreaming of a job with the U.S. State Department as a Foreign Service Officer, and had engineered my entire college career toward that end, with study abroad in Spain and France, a semester of study in foreign affairs at the American University, and an internship with the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee. However, for the written portion of the FSO examinations I scored 145 points out of the 146 points I needed to make it to the oral tier, so my dream of becoming an FSO was dashed. I then graduated from college and moved to Washington, DC in 1994, attempting to break into the international relations sector from another angle through applying for jobs as a foreign affairs analyst, and all my efforts went up in smoke there as well. I couldn’t even get a job as an executive assistant at any of the embassies or government offices in town. In my job search I was invited back by people countless times for a second interview, but the jobs always ended up going to someone in-house or to someone they knew. Always the bridesmaid, but never the bride!
In the meantime, I had to pay the rent, so I temped as an executive assistant at the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and numerous think tanks. At one of them, the World Resources Institute, I worked as part of a team that was preparing a report to be submitted to the first Summit of the Americas (Miami Summit). I was asked to translate some articles that a group of Latin American journalists had written on sustainable development projects in Latin America, articles that would be included in this report with their translations. My co-worker, who was responsible for coordinating the articles and communicating with the journalists, had worked as a part-time translator for 20 years, and told me, “Your translations of these articles are excellent. You have a gift. Have you ever considered becoming a translator?” I laughed because I had this picture in my head of translators being these pedantic recluses without a life, huddled behind piles of books that they never emerged from to see the light of day, and I, of course, was not like that. After patiently listening to all my objections and stereotypes, she simply handed me information on the translation certification program at Georgetown University’s Linguistics Department, saying, “Look, just humor me and check it out.” I went to their next orientation session, spoke with the professors, and in two hours’ time, I knew in my heart that this was for me.
Read the rest of this entry »
