For some of us it’s the first magical encounter with an exotic culture on a childhood holiday, or an (imaginary) love affair with a faraway star singing in a foreign language, but for the young Simon Barnes, it was the quiet presence at home of his father’s French and German books that provided the first gateway to a new world. There can’t have been many shelves lined with such books in the small Leicestershire town of Market Bosworth (the scene of a defining battle in a civil war that marked England’s history), but then again his father had started out as a French and German teacher, before leaving to work for Rolls Royce.
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Like a trail of breadcrumbs in a fairytale, we can trace Elke Fehling’s love for languages all the way back through the decades. Her mother, who had been an au pair, was keen for her daughters to learn to speak other languages, so she encouraged them to watch Sesame Street from a young age (in English with German subtitles, which the 4-year-old Elke couldn’t read). Along with family trips to Italy and Spain, that early exposure sowed the seeds and inspired a sense of the magical properties of foreign languages.
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In some ways, Jonathan Downie’s journey to the prominent position he now occupies within the interpreting industry occurred against the odds. Being born on a working-class council housing estate in the West of Scotland to a father who worked on the country’s railways, and a mother who took on various jobs over the years, didn’t exactly point straight to a degree, a Master’s, a doctorate, and a career in languages, with extensive research work and the publishing of two acclaimed books along the way.
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We are in the second week of the 2021 year-end membership campaign, "Keep it safe". Last week, a good number of users decided to keep their businesses safe no matter what the new year brings, while taking advantage of the special offer included in the campaign:
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ProZ.com celebrates International Translation Day with two full days of online sessions, panel discussions, live Q&As, live chat, and more.
Join this free virtual event at 10:00 AM GMT on September 29 and 30 to enjoy:
There are many within the translation and interpreting community who live far from the land where they were born. We pack our bags without too much difficulty, learn new languages, assimilate new cultures, make new friends. But even among such a well-travelled and cosmopolitan community, some stories stand out as unusual, and that of Yalda Hamidi, an Afghan interpreter now living in Ecuador, is remarkable.
It’s hard to picture two more different places than the Kathmandu Valley and suburban Toronto, but such extreme contrasts form a natural part of the narrative of Bimal Man Shrestha’s life.
This guest post was written by the National Accreditation of Educational Translators and Interpreters of Spoken Languages. NAETISL will be holding its Inaugural Conference online, from June 25-26, 2021.
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So how does a man born in South Africa, brought up in Mozambique and educated in Malawi end up as a medical interpreter in Fortaleza in Brazil?
In fact it turns out the story’s logical enough, especially as Mozambique and Brazil share the same language. Carlos Kwengwe’s mother is a white Brazilian, who met his father, a black Mozambican, when they were studying together in Brazil in the 80s, at a time when Mozambique was still being torn apart by civil war.
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In fact it turns out the story’s logical enough, especially as Mozambique and Brazil share the same language. Carlos Kwengwe’s mother is a white Brazilian, who met his father, a black Mozambican, when they were studying together in Brazil in the 80s, at a time when Mozambique was still being torn apart by civil war.
The ProZ.com Interpreter Network -the pool of pre-screened professional interpreters- continues to grow with new interpreters joining every day 🚀
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From selling water from a truck to earning an impressive living as an interpreter is quite a journey. But then that’s true of Ivanildo Xavier’s life as a whole – an adventure that saw him travel to Bolivia, working in bars and living on the wild side, before finally returning home to settle down and build his career.
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The country where you were born and bred and spent your first 11 years implodes into civil war, with warlords running riot, and militia groups vying for domination of the capital Mogadishu. Ongoing armed conflict, insecurity, lack of state protection, and recurring humanitarian crises expose your fellow-Somali civilians to serious abuse, resulting in millions of internally displaced people, with many living unassisted and vulnerable. As a family, there aren’t that many choices open to you, if all you want is a quiet life, and a chance to educate your children.
As you know, ProZ.com works closely with Boostlingo to provide Remote Simultaneous Interpreters (RSI), and we have a whole bunch of unsung heroes who are not only providing vital input to communities and individuals in equally unsung places, but making good money from home, popping up whenever their services are needed in real time.
As any other aspect of our lives, our jobs have been re-shaped by this “new reality”. As language professionals we are used to perform remote work, but for interpreters reality is –or was– different.
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