Skip to main content

How did you choose your specialty fields? Passion first! Ewa Erdmann's story



Would you like to know more about specialization in the language and translation industry? Ewa Erdmann is going to share her story with you now. How did she choose her fields? Here's what she says:

Passion first
Just as doctors and lawyers choose areas they want to specialise in, translators should decide what field they want to pursue. Unquestionably, it is a very important decision, since it will determine their future work, marketing efforts and lifestyle.

The reasons behind their choice vary from translator to translator, but most frequently the determining factors are experience (being previously employed in a particular industry), passion / interests (depending on how strongly they feel about this area of specialisation) or academic background. 

In my case, it was initially passion that lead to pursuing academic education and experience in my chosen fields. My main specialisations are legal and marketing translations. I am fascinated with both of them, especially from linguistic point of view, and this is the main reason why I enjoy translating legal documents and marketing texts such as website content, company and product descriptions, press releases, etc.

Ironically, both of them are totally unrelated. Legal language is very rigid and technical, and most of the time there is only one correct Polish equivalent for every English legal term that you absolutely have to use, and you also need to strictly follow the format of the original document, i.e. you have to make sure that everything is in the right place. You should also try to retain the sentence structure, so when it sounds awkward in the source language it would probably sound weird in the target language too, and let’s face it, most of the time legal documents do sound awkward and unnatural. What I enjoy the most about legal translation is playing a detective who pursues exactly the right or the closest equivalent of a given term: comparing definitions, looking things up in legislation, making sure a particular term is used in this area of law and in this context. Part of the fun is the exploring and the other part is actually finding the right term, which is very rewarding. The same rule applies to medical translation, which I am starting to enjoy more and more.

When it comes to marketing translation though, it is a completely different story, and the rules are... ehm, what rules? When I think of marketing translation, the first thing that springs to my mind is creativity, and this is what I mostly rely on when translating marketing materials. Instead of concentrating on the meaning of every word, I work on conveying the whole message whilst trying to produce an appealing translation that reads naturally and is effective marketing-wise. The focus, therefore, is on the reader, i.e. potential customer – will they find a product or service attractive after reading my translation? Would this word make the product more tempting to them? Marketing translation allows me to play with the language, have fun with words, phrases, idioms and sentences giving me much more freedom than legal translation. 

Although completely diverse, legal and marketing specialisations give me some sort of balance between being very limited as to the choice of equivalents and almost free when translating. I find both of them very stimulating and rewarding – this is why I chose them, and this is why I am going to stick to them.

Dear Ewa, thank you so much for sharing your story!



Моя фотографияEwa Erdmann (@transliteria) is a qualified and experienced freelance English-Polish translator with both linguistics and legal background. She provides translation, interpreting, website localization, editing and proofreading services for individuals and businesses. You can learn more about Ewa if you visit her website transliteria. And I absolutely love Ewa's blog where she shares her experience with the readers.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

10 interesting facts about the Russian language

In my previous post  I promised to follow with the  interesting info about some other languages. So here are 10 facts about the Russian language which might be of interest to those who are studying it. If you would like to have this list in Russian, please contact me and I will send it to you by email. So, what do I find interesting about my native language? 1. Russian has about 500,000 words, but only 2,000-2,500 of them are used frequently. 100 most frequently used words make 20% of all written and oral speech. A high school graduate's vocabulary usually has 1,500 to 4,000 words. Those who have graduated from a higher educational institution normally have a richer vocabulary consisting of approximately  8,000 words. 2. It's compulsory for all astronauts in the international space station to learn Russian, so we can call it an international language of space :)

15 interesting facts about the English language

I prepared this list for one of my English classes. And then it dawned on me that I can share it with you, too! So here are 15 facts about the English language that I find very interesting. Hope you do, too ;) Rudyard Kipling was fired as a reporter for the San Francisco Examiner. His dismissal letter said, "I'm sorry, Mr. Kipling, but you just don't know how to use the English language. This isn't a kindergarten for amateur writers." No language has more synonyms than English.

Translation Forum Russia 2017: my report

A few days ago I came back from Translation Forum Russia which took place in Ufa, Bashkortostan . My daughter Delia went with me because she never visited Ufa before (neither have I) and because of the trip to the Southern Ural mountains we planned to take after the conference with a small group of colleagues. Ufa is not considered one of the primary tourist attractions of Russia, though I am convinced now that it definitely should be. Some pictures of the city (not all of the pictures are mine, some were made by the official photographer of the conference Elena Ekaterininskaya, our company CEO Fedor Kondratovich and some other colleagues): The bee is a symbol of the region as Bashkortostan produces the best honey in Russia. We saw installations shown below in different parts of the city. There were still covered because of the cold weather, but they will be full of blooming flowers as soon as the warm weather comes. The bee as we saw it That's what it