Teresa López
Translator, Interpreter
ETSEA Universitat de Lleida
Writing this small summary about my week was a good exercise that made me reflect about the different environments I find myself in within the week, or I should say within the day. Monday morning starts at work, in the International Relations Office, where we are supposed to help students and teaching staff move around through different countries in order to fulfil their academic purposes. It is usually a rather complicated work, sometimes frustrating and sometimes not, and occasionally really rewarding. People call with doubts, questions or an indefinite wish to move, and they go away with either an answer, a piece of information, or simply somewhere else to call because what they want is dealt with somewhere else. We manage different types of calls. Calls for mobility, calls for projects of co-operation, calls for attending international courses, etc.
At the end of the morning I realise we answered many questions and re-directed a lot of people. Basically, we talk a lot. Then I sometimes start to wonder what is it I am really doing, until someone suddenly looks relieved, smiles at me and says something like: ‘Thank you! I didn’t know I could do that!’ or somebody comes back from a stay abroad telling me what a good experience it was. And I suppose this answers some of my existential questions. At work it is really busy, many times I don’t have the tools or the information I would like to, but I quite like it as a whole. Then in the afternoon I am off to classes. Most of the days I can’t even attend them, because I finish work too late, but I take the chance to meet my class mates, to know what’s going on in the course, to exchange notes. Last week I was even invited to a student’s party! For a few hours it is like being back to youth. Or it is maybe part of this new way to be an adult where you don’t have to be a young person to go back to studying. In the mornings and early afternoons, at work, I’m working for the students; in the afternoons, as a student, I’m back to youth through the back door. At night I sit in front of my computer and read my e-mail. I deal for a few hours with that translation that I have to hand in before I would like to. No matter how different translations can be, ninety per cent of the time, they have something in common: They need to be done for the day before yesterday. There’s always a way to meet the deadline in the end: well, this is what nights are for! This, multiplied by five, would be explanatory for a whole week, since days can be pretty much like one another. But there are completely different days where I have a job to do as an interpreter. Everything changes then: I take my huge dictionary and my notes with me and I head for the place where I’m going to translate for the next few hours or eventually for the rest of the day. In order to produce a good job when translating it is important to be able to prepare for the event. Having some material, reading about the subject and having the keywords handy is essential. The amount of difficulty is usually in indirect proportion to the times I’ve dealt with a particular subject, and the amount of tension is too.
I always compare simultaneous translating to a risk sport. There’s no chance of correction. The moment goes, and you have to grasp the idea and communicate it fast enough, because the speaker doesn’t stop, and the next idea is there already. There’s no way back, no second chance. I really like this job, not just because of the monetary benefits it brings, but for the interesting subjects you get to translate and the fact of helping different people understand each other.
Teresa López
Translator, Interpreter
ETSEA Universitat de Lleida Av. Rovira Roure,
191 25198
Lleida Spain