Spanish to English translator Nicole Lisa recently interviewed me for the Love Your Job blog, and the interview is now online here. You can also read the earlier interviews in Love Your Job’s “5 questions for…” series, with posts about an actor, an architect and a voice teacher who all love their jobs.
Interviews
YouTube clip: Peter Less on interpreting at Nuremburg
Here’s an interesting YouTube clip (it’s short, just over a minute) of interpreting legend Peter Less talking about remaining impartial while interpreting at the Nuremberg Trials. Less, who won the ATA’s Gode Medal (one of the translation world’s highest honors) in 2006, fled to Switzerland as a teenager but his mother, father, sister and grandmother remained behind and died in the Holocaust.
Less went on to become one of the first trained conference interpreters in Europe and subsequently found himself interpreting for some of the people responsible for the Nazi regime’s worst atrocities. He then emigrated to the U.S. and practiced law in Chicago for over 50 years. There’s a full interview between Tanya Gesse and Peter Less here, on the website of the International Association of Conference Interpreters.
Audio interview: getting started as a freelance translator
While I’m formulating a few posts on the recent ATA conference in New York, here’s an interview that I’ve been meaning to post for a while. Colorado-based Portuguese translator, interpreter and voiceover talent Cris Silva (who has the distinction of being Colorado’s only ATA-certified English to Portuguese translator) recently interviewed me about getting started as a freelancer. Cris is teaching a freelancing class for the University of Denver translation certificate program and she asked me the following questions:
- What were the first steps you took to get started as a freelancer?
- What does a typical day in your work life look like?
- What is it that you love about being a freelancer?
- How does your Internet presence fit into your freelance identity?
- If you had only one piece of advice for beginning translators, what would it be?
Click here to listen to the 15-minute interview on drop.io’s site. There’s an audio player (no download) right on the site, or the whole interview is 3.3 MB if you’d like to download it. Two context notes, when you hear us talking about “CTA,” this is the Colorado Translators Association, and “Eve” is Eve Bodeux, with whom I co-host the podcast Speaking of Translation.Thanks to Cris for her great questions, and happy listening!