A colleague and member of the Circle who is relatively new to the field suggested to me that she and others starting out could find it useful to hear the professional stories of those of us who have been translating for a few years. This article is my response to that request.
When I was an early adolescent and U.S. immigrant to the Netherlands, people around me expressed admiration for how quickly and well I learned Dutch. My family’s circle of friends and my schoolteachers recommended that I consider taking up translating when the time came to choose a career. This seemed to be a profession in which I would have guaranteed success. The way I saw it, they were just trying to dissuade me from my long-held aspirations to become a musician and composer. As years passed, I toyed with the idea of becoming a translator but without much conviction. After all, a continuing passion of mine was to read books in their original languages. I found that reading translations was much less thrilling and it felt like somewhat of a cop-out.
As a young adult, I entered law school in the Netherlands with an underlying strategy of becoming a legal translator. A Spanish teacher whom I consulted about my career path insisted that a university degree in a foreign language was much less valuable to a translator than a degree in some instrumental specialty such as law, medicine, or economics. One could always take language classes on the side. I chose law because of a course I had taken in a U.S. high school called “Street Law,” which had inspired and fascinated me. It was my introduction to legal concepts and thinking. Once I was immersed in legal studies, I began to fancy myself as a practicing attorney. But my volunteer work in human rights and environmentalism, which I did throughout my studies, eventually disillusioned me about the politics of fighting for causes. I found that there were very few clear victories, and the ongoing struggles wore on me. And I became discouraged by a bleak reality about human nature: even the noblest of the people I worked with could be subject to the basest of vices.
In the end, I gave up law school and returned to the U.S. When I was already 30, I went back to college to pursue a degree in Latin American studies. By the time I finished the program, I was once again more interested in human rights than translation. Although it seemed obvious that I had considerable strengths to bring to a career in translation, particularly of legal documents from Dutch into English, I believed that path could lead to an exercise that was potentially useless to society, or worse. It would not tackle any vital social issues or help anybody who was really in need. Yet I resigned myself to economic reality and decided to translate for a living and do volunteer work as an avocation.
I expected a clear path to becoming a professional translator, an impression I had gotten from others with more knowledge of the field than I had. I spoke four languages fluently and had a solid understanding of law as well as some other subjects. My academic credentials were substantial. So I started looking into translation agencies in New York City first and foremost, since that was where I lived. I had understood that the agencies were the gatekeepers to the profession. In 2004, I called them and sent them cover letters and résumé by mail and by my newly acquired fax machine. I tried to get my foot in the door with the experience I had gained over the years on several one-time translation engagements.
The agencies’ initial response was tepid. Whereas I thought they would be my enthusiastic collaborators, they told me they would contact me when the need arose—when they told me anything at all. I would not be daunted, however, and I even did the rounds to several agencies in person. The efficacy of this tactic is debatable, but eventually the work did begin to come in sporadically. The rates I was able to command did not seem to promise financial comfort anytime soon. And despite all of my years of study in law and language, the texts I encountered were fraught with terminology and backgrounds that I sometimes had never even suspected existed. This ordeal tested the limits of my reference resources and obliged me to expand them, an overwhelming task since I had to make gruelingly tight deadlines and spend the rest of my time doing everything else possible to survive on subsistence remuneration.
After a few months, the translations became more consistent, and a few of my acquired clients seemed to like my work, my price, my turnaround time, or all of the above. I was certainly thorough. Even if I knew a term in Dutch, I did not necessarily know it in English, let alone in Spanish and German. I questioned every facile solution, whether it be literal or just suggested by an uncorroborated source. But this did not yet procure me the fluent, idiomatic technical prose in my target language of English that I aspired to write. As practice, I devoted considerable time to the drudgery of reading contracts, starting with credit card agreements I received in the mail and my apartment lease. Yet the scope of what I might encounter on the job seemed too colossal to prepare for.
I submit that insecurity about one’s craft is endemic to our profession, although there are exceptions—a relatively few highly-specialized linguists among us. Even though a person does workshops, talks to colleagues, researches terminology and style, and reads the trade literature—all of which I did—this does not take away the patently solitary nature of working as a freelance translator in the industry’s current configuration. If we run astray, who will put us back on track? One windfall in my career was the help of a luminary in the field of Dutch to English legal translation who corrected some of my translations and gave me feedback. All in all, I have improved exponentially over time, yet still feel at times that the task is bigger than I am.
I do not blame myself for this situation, at least not chiefly. I did not have the money to go back to school for translation or interpreting. And who is to say that some professors there would not teach me more bad habits? The rates and deadlines I was able to negotiate consistently hampered my aspirations for quality. After all, if I earned three times as much as I do and the deadlines were three times as long, I could spend that much more time perfecting my work. Is this really impossible? Did my clients really care or was it just my own desire to do the best I possibly could and fulfill my potential? Production and the craft of translation are in constant conflict. In 2009, in the thick of the Great Recession, work all but dried up and I started to seriously question the viability of this career at all.
I began to pursue interpreting a year or so after I became a full-time translator. My professional interest in it grew because I found it challenging, personally satisfying, and it paid better per hour. I started out as a volunteer interpreting at international relations events. Then I did telephonic interpreting, which actually paid less than translating but served well as practice. Court proceedings, medical interviews, and social services calls were involved, along with a whole roulette wheel of other possible calls. After that, I interpreted at depositions as well as at medical visits onsite in New York City. After a protracted process, I became certified to interpret in the New York State Courts. I have interpreted almost full-time for the courts for a few months as of this writing.
Even after certification, getting into the court circuit has been arduous. One benefit of court interpreting that I did not find in document translation is the constant interaction with people and the opportunity to help them, often in crucial matters involving their safety or a roof over their heads. When you start out in the courts, however, no one really gives you the preparation you need. So it is rough in the beginning but, contrary to translation, you have much more time to come up to speed by doing your homework. You have more downtime on the job, and a shorter work day. You also have many colleagues with whom you can confer about terminology or whatever else comes up. And now, when I do sporadic translation projects, I enjoy them as a change of pace. So I am earning more and I derive more satisfaction from what I am doing. It is too early to call this a happy ending, if such a thing exists. After all, life is a process. Whatever it brings me, I feel grateful to have been able to see so much of the world through language.
Originally published in The Gotham Translator.
Leonard Morin 