Over at the Translators and Interpreters (ProZ.com) Facebook Group, there are plans for a series of weekly posts introducing you to the people behind ProZ.com. Some of them you may have come across, while others have remained in the shadows… until now! In the weeks and months ahead, we’ll get to know all of them in turn. This is our 16th profile.
Like many of our crack support team in La Plata, Julieta Llamazares first came across ProZ.com through a presentation given by Lu Leszinsky at the local University about the translation industry. But her heart was initially set on a job at a translation agency.
Around five years later, Julieta was on the lookout for a job as a freelance translator or a creative writer, and just beginning to find her way around LinkedIn. She stumbled across a ProZ advert and thought back to that presentation. The words “What if?” popped into her mind, especially when she saw the details of the job description. Once she decided to throw her hat in the ring, the usual series of tasks and interviews followed, leaving her feeling slightly intimidated – “Why would they choose me?” But choose her they did, to her delight, plus that of her friends, her family and her boyfriend…
Maybe Julieta’s application was helped by her impressive level of English. All of our Argentinian support team are proficient in the language of course, but her fluency and pronunciation stands out – a fact she attributes to a three-month internship in the States and a particularly gruelling two-year phonology course during her degree, involving lots of study of muscle movement in the mouth, and intense practice of various sounds. Well, it certainly worked.
Her range of duties today includes specifically helping the commission-based members, and dealing with routine queries from translators. But she has special responsibility for the translation contests, along with glossary-building KudoZ, and localising the ProZ.com website, which is currently in various stages of completion in 84 languages, ranging from almost complete in Spanish to just getting started in Sinhalese.
The best thing about the job, she says, is being in contact with professionals from all over the world, learning about other cultures and languages, and the struggles facing people in various places, such as rates and payment practices, including the difficulty of being paid at all in countries like her native Argentina, with high taxation on dollar payments. Or the challenges of changing specialisms or even combinations forced on some by economic circumstances…
For now, the prospect of becoming a freelance translator is on the back-burner, as the insights into the industry she has gained more than make up for the lack of daily practice. What’s more her daily contact through email with so many translators gives her a very clear sense of living the ups and downs of the profession vicariously. So there are no plans to change…
Ever curious, Julieta is always looking for something new to learn and throw her energies into. Her current interests include computer programming, especially in HTML, Javascript and CCS. It’s a far cry from studying languages, which has always been her passion till now, but after completing a few courses later, and going ever further down the rabbit hole, she’s discovered her inner geek!
PS Juli left ProZ.com in 2022. We wish her well in her onward journey!
