Books. Newspaper articles. Commercial correspondence. Computer games. Advertisement. Economics texts. Recipes. Contracts.
All these things have been mentioned during class. But there are things no teacher dares to mention. Dark things. Much darker than any economics text (Yes, that’s possible.) Things no one ever talks about. Especially not in a translation context...
Two weeks ago I was still a normal 20-year old alien. Studying at a university. The worst things I knew where all those deaths they show in the news every evening at 6pm. And the ‘no internet connection’ notification on phone and laptop. But that’s it.
Until that evening.
I was once again procrastinating in front of a text about American teenagers when my laptop suddenly opened Google and typed “translation jobs English/German” in the search bar. After a few seconds the eBay-page opened and showed me various different translation jobs.
I wanted to close the page when a job offer caught my eye: “
Translator wanted for translation from German into English. Requirements: English native speaker or someone who has lived abroad for some time or a professional interpreter. Please no one with school English.”
As a translation student this offer annoyed me more than it should have so I decided to message that person to tell them that 1) being a native speaker doesn’t mean someone can translate 2) spending time abroad doesn’t say anything about the language skills of a person and 3) an interpreter is not a translator.
I wasn’t particularly nice to say the least.
... The result was that I got a message the next morning – asking me whether I could/would translate that ‘advertisement’ with less than 300 words.
I didn’t know what kind of text it was but I was bored and that person said it would probably be easy for me so we agreed on a price and I was sent the link to the page I had to translate.
I expected ANYTHING but that.
In short: it was the comp card of a callboy. And because the text wasn’t disturbing enough already there were also pictures AND different sizes and measurements on the page.
I think it would've been difficult to find a translator who's further away from this topic than me.
After exams that didn’t go too well we have often joked about going into the porn industry/becoming a stripper… I guess that was the first step. And it will probably be my weirdest job for a very long time.
It’s really difficult to get into this whole literature translating business and I know it’s really badly paid… but I’ve always wanted to try it. And now’s the best time to do so. Finally being able to use all this stuff we’ve learned in the last one and a half years. No one telling you that you have to translate the ‘wiring of the house’ with ‘Verkabelung des Hauses’ (I’m not going to explain here why this has been upsetting me for almost 6 months now).