To start the week off, here’s a great question that I received from reader Dorota Krysinska. She asks:
“…could you explain in your blog how it happened that you started specializing in legal, corporate communications and public health/international development translations? Did you have any background in these fields? I have been wondering how someone like me, who has done her degree in linguistic studies can begin to specialize as a translator in areas that she hasn’t studied at all. Also, how do I go about sending out my resume to translation agencies and not having any particular field of translation specified there?”
The issue of specializations seems to come up a lot in our industry, so I’ll offer my answer here and I hope that other readers will contribute their thoughts. When I started translating, I was in pretty much the same boat as Dorota; I had a Master’s in French Literature and had used French in my job (teaching high school) for eight years so I was reasonably confident about my language skills. In addition, I’ve always loved to write and I had done sideline work writing for magazines and had even worked in the editorial department of a book review publication in the summer. However, I didn’t have an obvious area of specialization. I think that this be a plus and a minus: in one sense, I really envied (and still sometimes do!) people who become translators after having worked in banking, law, pharmaceuticals, engineering, etc. because they are immediately able to jump in to a very specialized field. On the other hand, I think that someone who starts out as a generalist has a lot more opportunities to experiment with various specializations than someone who is fairly locked in to a certain field.
One of the best pieces of advice I’ve heard about specializations came from Jill Sommer, who said “Pick an area that you enjoy researching.” In that vein, I’ve always had a secret (or now not so secret) desire to go to law school. For whatever reason, I just love reading legal documents and deciphering the jargon in them. Party of the first part…pursuant to…notwithstanding…aforementioned… I don’t know, I just enjoy it. Similarly, I enjoy reading the business news so corporate communications was a good fit for me, and I read a lot about health topics as well, hence my translation focus on public health. On the contrary, hard science has just never been my thing. I like science as an idea, I like listening to science stories on NPR, I enjoy translating “lighter” science documents about health and wellness, but give me a chemical patent and my eyes glaze over almost immediately.
So, I think the number one rule if you start out as a generalist is to pick documents that you enjoy reading and researching. Also, I think it can be helpful to identify some of your non-specializations as well. When I work with direct clients who have a wide range of documents, I sometimes tell them what I don’t do (patents, anything having to do with engineering or technical specifications, heavy financial documents) so that they know if I am a good fit for them.
When it comes to contacting translation companies, I think it’s best to be completely honest and differentiate between specializations in which you have experience and specializations in which you are interested. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with telling the client that although you’ve never translated in the area of X, you are very interested in X topic in your own language and you know a lot about the terminology (this once landed me a job translating the script for a promotional video about rock climbing ropes). Also, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with saying “I’m just starting my business so I’m open to working in a variety of specializations; some of my areas of interest are…”
Thank you for a great piece of advice. I hope your readers will contribute too, for what I will be very grateful.
Thank you for this post Corinne. This is a timely post for me, as I am currently working on specialising in a field in which I have no experience – medicine. It made me nervous to think about it before, but now I am convinced I can do it, despite my lack of medical training, because I am motivated enough to work myself to the top. Here is my plan:
– I have subscribed to a couple of medical journals (one in my source language, one in my target language). I not only read the journals to keep me up-to-date on developments, but also to compile a subject-specific glossary which may come in useful for any future translations.
– Next year I will be taking a diploma in medicine. I have found a course that will give me a good grounding in general areas, and I hope to take future courses in more specialised areas of medicine.
– I search online for high quality translations in the medical field, and I use the source text & translation to build my subject-specific glossary and study how other translators dealt with difficult words / phrases in the source text.
So far I haven’t done any medical translations yet. I don’t feel ready to tackle this complex area until I have gained a fair amount of knowledge. However, I will start marketing my services as a medical translator in the near future.
I’m looking forward to reading other readers’ comments too. Specialising is what makes translation exciting, and what will take my career to the next level.
Being interested in your area of specialisation is, I think, enormously important, particularly if you do a lot of work in it, and it can be beneficial if that area has sufficient breadth or overlaps with other subject areas too. Just like actors suffer from typecasting, it requires a certain amount of dedication to translate large quantities of text on a narrowly defined subject. I came to translation after having worked in my field – architecture – for several years and have actually found that translating has given me the opportunity to investigate other areas of my field that my work did not (or at least not to the same degree).
Olivia, that sounds like real dedication and I admire your commitment. That’s a field that would scare me because of the many potentials pitfalls of a wrong translation.
Thanks to everyone for your helpful comments! I think that Olivia is really onto something; taking a course in one of your specializations (in your target language) is probably the best way for a generalist to specialize. On a smaller level, you could take a medical/legal terminology course, or a course in marketing writing, etc. Good for you Olivia for taking this big step!!
Thank you for the good advice!
I am also looking for a field to specialize in. I was thinking about automotive translations as I was doing some in the past – so in order the get deeper in the topic I read magazines, have bought specialized books and so on.
The same goes for IT – routers in my case, as IT is a broad topic.
I also think that knowing you non-specialization fields is important.