When I started working as a freelance translator a few years back, I was really scared at the prospect of working alone from home while all the people I knew had a workplace to go to and cheerful (…) colleagues to chat with. At the time I was living in Beaugency, a rural town in the Loire Valley, and I was only 23 years old.
I think what worried was the isolation and thinking that I would spend entire days on my own, with a stubborn computer, for sole company. I also imagined that each day would be a repetition of the previous one and that I would become a lonely hermit cut out from the rest of the world! And on top of everything I wasn’t even sure I would rise up to the challenge…
In other words, I was looking on the dark side of things!
A few years down the line, it turns out I was wrong and I’ll explain why. I now live in Brighton, still from home and I’m really happy with it!
Yes, it is undeniable, being a translator is a lonely activity and even though there is a very active online community, it is not the same as real human contact. Most of the time you don’t have any colleagues and on certain days you feel quite isolated. However, there are easy actions to solve these problems: have a very active social life (meet with friends on a regular basis, join a club, band or volunteer organisation) and go out in the real world for a breath of fresh air. With such an active online community, you can also meet your virtual colleague and attach a face to their name! And remember, your job gives you a lot of freedom to organise all these things.
If you are still desperate, you can join a shared office such as this one. But remind yourself that working from home spares you all the hassle of employment and daily commuting - and therefore money.
In the beginning, I was very bad at organising my days and I often found myself still laying in bed at 11 a.m. I would therefore still be working until late in the night. But with the time I discovered that there were at least 4 hours before 11 when a lot of work could be achieved! And this, on top of tremendously increasing my productivity, enabled me to remain on top of things and to organise a regular working schedule, which includes “non-work” activities (gym, socialising, music, reading).
An other thing that can help is to set up some rules. Although I sometimes find it quite hard to discipline myself, I too try to be out of my pyjamas first thing in the morning. Not working during breakfast and taking a lunch-break are also very good ideas. If I can I go out to have lunch with friends and I try to read the news during breakfast.
During these past years I’ve also discovered what I absolutely love about my job.
On top of being interesting and stimulating, being a translator gives you unprecedented freedom: you can simply work from anywhere in the world as long as you have a computer and a reliable internet connexion. You can also decide when you want to work. If you prefer to work at night, work at night, at dawn, work at dawn. Amazing! Do you know of many jobs that allow you to do that?
I now love translating. At the beginning I found it quite daunting but the more I did it, the more I grew confident, and the more I started to love dissecting sentences and transposing ideas into another language. I find it’s a great way to scrutinise the languages you love and to learn about different subjects (and sometimes really in depth).
Since I like to think of myself as a creative person, I have been very pleased that translation enabled to express my creative energy. For example when you have to translate a book or adapt a movie, you are not just translating but you recreate the idea in the target language. Very hard but often very rewarding.
And finally, never having had a boss is for me a great achievement! Since I went freelance as soon as I finished my translation studies, I’ve as of yet never experienced the “joy” of dealing with an incompetent but powerful senior manager!
See, plenty of reasons to stay in!
Tags: adaptation of movies, Brighton, creativity, freedom, freelance translation, translation of books, translators, working from home
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A little more on literary translation
October 24th, 2008 by Clément
To finish the week, I will talk about an interesting article I came upon during one of my surf session on the blogosphere.
It talks about the global market of literary translation and it’s in French so I’ll just give a translation of the interesting points in case you don’t understand:
- “In the world, one out of two translated books was originally written in English; one out of ten in German or French; one out of a hundred in Italian”
> In other words a lot of potential jobs for French and German literary translators and not so many for English ones!
- “The United States is, for example, a country where there are few literary translations (4% of total production), and very few in French.”
> There has been a lot of heated talks (For example, visit here or here) on that subject around the time of the announcement of the Nobel Price in Literature when Horace Engdahl, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, declared: “The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature … That ignorance is restraining.”
- “So that all the countries, or nearly all of them, have set up bodies which subsidize translation, with sometimes substantial budgets.”
> Good thing to know for translators. The CNL’s (Centre National du Livre) website has a special page for these subsidies with some information and application forms. One of the requirements before applying is to have translated at least one book which was then published in French. Not too bad!
If you want to read the original article, go to: http://bibliobs.nouvelobs.com/20081016/7821/qui-traduit-quoi
Have a nice weekend,
Clément.
Thank you Nigel