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31st translation contest: "A translator's life" » English to Maltese

Competition in this pair is now closed.

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Source text in English

[...] Translators just didn't get recognition, they didn't expect to make much of a living, just get by. Very few people were actually trained as translators, but most had a solid college education and a solid knowledge of languages, at least their own language. I had a friend who fell exactly into that category and my circle of friends expanded to include other translators. I found them to be much more interesting as people, and discovered that we often had similar life experiences. I never had trouble making friends, but I always felt "different" and I'm sure they felt it too. When my friend retired, she recommended me as her replacement. I now entered the realm of Reinsurance, of which I knew nothing. I was also the only translator there, and didn't have much to fall back on. However, it was another notch up....

On my new job, I started looking through the files, asking questions and got the company to enroll me in Insurance courses. The College of Insurance was across the street, and I consulted fire codes, insurance policies and fire extinguisher catalogs in their library. I was learning what I had never had the luxury of being able to do before: research. The first time I had to translate a proposal for purposes of insurance of a nuclear plant, I got a call from the head man in that department, congratulating me on the job I had done. "Compares favorably with what we are used to," he said. What an upper! What happened was that I consulted a document in the files similar to the one I was tackling for guidance, but when I saw that my predecessor had used the word "nucleus" instead of "core", I realized that the files were useless to me. I went across the street to the library and looked up "nuclear plants." I immediately found all the terminology I needed.

It takes a great deal more than that to be a good translator these days, of course. [...]

Winning entries could not be determined in this language pair.

There were 3 entries submitted in this pair during the submission phase. Not enough votes were submitted by peers for a winning entry to be determined.

Competition in this pair is now closed.


Entries (3 total) Expand all entries

Entry #35495 — Discuss 0 — Variant: Not specified
Voting points1st2nd3rd
41 x400
Entry tagging:
  • 1 user entered 1 "like" tag
biex nieħu postha
Flows well
that's the​ sense her​e
Josephine Cassar
Entry #36397 — Discuss 0 — Variant: Not specified
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41 x400
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  • 1 user entered 2 "like" tags
edukazzjoni sekondarja
Good term selection
davdand
inserraħ
Good term selection
davdand
Entry #36499 — Discuss 0 — Variant: Not specified
Voting points1st2nd3rd
1001 x1
Entry tagging:
  • No "like" tags