Note: this text contains no references to coronavirus...
So there I was, in my top-floor flat in a quiet suburb of the honking, clanking city that is Dhaka, with its 15 million inhabitants, its rickshaws, heat, pollution, concrete, humidity, and lush greenery.
I still had a year to go on my 9-5 at the Ministry of Education, but in my head I was already far away in France.
After a bit of Googling around the subject, I knew I had to do two things: t... See more Note: this text contains no references to coronavirus...
So there I was, in my top-floor flat in a quiet suburb of the honking, clanking city that is Dhaka, with its 15 million inhabitants, its rickshaws, heat, pollution, concrete, humidity, and lush greenery.
I still had a year to go on my 9-5 at the Ministry of Education, but in my head I was already far away in France.
After a bit of Googling around the subject, I knew I had to do two things: to get my French back up to speed and to learn how to translate. We’ll look at the second of those in my next post, but first came the language.
It had been over twenty years since I’d had much contact with French. And while I still had impressive lists of flowers, trees and birds in my head, there were huge gaps in my vocabulary.
There were words I’d forgotten.
Then there were words I’d never learned in the first place.
Slang words that hadn’t existed back then.
Concepts like “global warming” that hadn’t even been discussed in the 80s.
A whole armoury of words around French politics, culture and administrative life that I’d never known, because I’d never lived in France.
In other words, I was running on empty. Or emptyish. And there was work to be done.
Luckily the Internet came to the rescue. And for a year, I spent several hours every evening listening to French radio, downloading magazines online, printing them out, highlighting every word I didn’t know, and then memorising them like a schoolboy.
All I could hear in my head was French. Every time I climbed onto a rickshaw I imagined it was a 2CV, and pictured the rickshaw-wallah wearing a beret.
That took some imagination. But I was determined, and besides I didn’t really have a choice.
This was going to be my toolkit for my second career, and I had to make sure the tools were sharp and clean.
So what about you? Did you have to do some serious work on your language before becoming a translator, or had you come straight from university? Or a job in which you used the language anyway?
Anyone else out there who had to put in some serious work before getting up to speed? ▲ Collapse
| | |
Login to reply/comment 
Translation news
