| Pages in topic: < [1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9] > | Poll: What was your first translation project about? Thread poster: ProZ.com Staff
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| Interview with French philosopher | Mar 3, 2016 |
It was nearly 25 years ago. I was living in Dublin at the time and I helped an Irish friend translate an interview from French into English. The interviewee was a French philosopher. I think it was Jacques Derrida, but my memory might fail me, it's been so long! I don't have a copy of it anymore, which is just as well cos I would likely be embarrassed by it. I recall I was paid in kind for the job.
My first paid English-into-Spanish translation, which I was commissioned just after ... See more It was nearly 25 years ago. I was living in Dublin at the time and I helped an Irish friend translate an interview from French into English. The interviewee was a French philosopher. I think it was Jacques Derrida, but my memory might fail me, it's been so long! I don't have a copy of it anymore, which is just as well cos I would likely be embarrassed by it. I recall I was paid in kind for the job.
My first paid English-into-Spanish translation, which I was commissioned just after I got my Diploma, was for a Dublin-based company dealing with industrial yeast products. Probably a business letter or some sort of report.
From deconstruction to yeast.
Oh, I was then the proud owner and user of an IBM 286 PC running WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS and of an extremely noisy printer for good measure. Long gone are those days! ▲ Collapse
| | | | | Mange tak, Gitte! I agree. | Mar 3, 2016 |
Gitte Hovedskov, MCIL wrote: Mario Freitas wrote:
It's really amazing how people use the quick polls and other forums. Most first jobs mentioned here were large and important documents. Most people started as experts with an important demand, not with a small document, for a low price and an unknown client, which would be a lot more plausible (and believable). Are you suggesting that we are all fibbing here to make ourselves stand out more favourably? Why is it so hard to believe that people have actually started their professional lives doing professional jobs? Could it not be, rather, that the people who answered the poll are actually professional, well-educated people, capable of undertaking difficult jobs even at the beginning of our careers? For once, this is an interesting poll, instead of the same-old, same-old questions being asked over and over again, and then you mock us for answering honestly, sharing a bit of our very different stories...
| | | | | A seductive love letter | Mar 3, 2016 |
A seductive love letter from a man posting on a dating website.
Had the impression it was not meant for only one woman.....
I liked it as a start - pity that all technical stuff followed
| | | | | Jesus Christ Super Star | Mar 3, 2016 |
I was in a Jesuit high school in my native Caracas, and our religion professor let us choose the topic for the semester. Three of us were selected to translate the lyrics to the opera from English to Spanish. Two of us are still doing translations 40-some years later.
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Félicien Sirois
United States
Local time: 18:45
Member
Italian to English
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| Quite a banging start | Mar 3, 2016 |
My first project was a rather substantial pile of German handwritten (ack!) responses to an employee satisfaction survey (many weren't). I can't exactly remember how big it was, but what I earned was enough to buy something I had been pining for a long time... a drum set.
25+ years later, after a few minor detours, I'm still translating... and playing that very same kit.
| | | | eski 
Mexico
Local time: 17:45
Member
Spanish to English
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MODERATOR | A legal dispute about a damaged sailboat | Mar 3, 2016 |
My first translation as a freelancer involved a legal dipute between two members of a yacht club. It wasn't a very big job, but the client was happy, recommended my work , and it landed me my next translation job!)
| | | | Michael O'Keeffe
Spain
Local time: 01:45
Member (2007)
Japanese to English
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| David Bowie called me at home ! | Mar 3, 2016 |
Summer of 1987, my Spanish wife and I had just launched ourselves as translators. Late on a Friday evening and fresh from Madrid on the Spider tour, DB called and softened our initial reluctance to translate two long reviews of the Spanish part of the tour in time for his debut in Ireland at Slane castle. The big deal maker was an offer of 10 free entries ! His professionalism was so apparent that it engendered the same in us, what a great guy, we miss him.
| | | | Sara Massons
France
Local time: 01:45
Member (2016)
English to French
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| A 10 pages document about how to feed cows for the dairy industry | Mar 4, 2016 |
It was back in 2002, my first "real" job, I was just starting in a company and my boss was expecting me to translate the document within one day... I had to make a very large list of unknown terminology and it took him several hours to explain them all so that I could translate... In the end it tool me one week !
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Barbara Villa
Brazil
Local time: 20:45
English to Portuguese
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| Water Mining Report - Portuguese to English | Mar 4, 2016 |
In 2003 my first job was a Water Mining Report that I translated to my dad´s company. Very technical for a begginer (And I did deliver it with far more errors than I allow myself today), but he paid me just fine, making me a MIL ionária...
[Edited at 2016-03-04 00:34 GMT]
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It was liner notes for a CD of Turkish minstrel music. It was nightmare. I took over the job from someone else who had worked for the music company for several years. She warned me to insist on seeing a proof before it went to print. They said okay, then didn't. They used the copy before the final copy (there was some back-and-forth about terminology) instead of the final. Things went strangely in the transfer from MS Word to whatever desktop publishing program they were using. Some capital Turk... See more It was liner notes for a CD of Turkish minstrel music. It was nightmare. I took over the job from someone else who had worked for the music company for several years. She warned me to insist on seeing a proof before it went to print. They said okay, then didn't. They used the copy before the final copy (there was some back-and-forth about terminology) instead of the final. Things went strangely in the transfer from MS Word to whatever desktop publishing program they were using. Some capital Turkish-only characters disappeared and all the hyphens disappeared. At the end, they added "Translate by Bob Beer."
I felt kind of sick. ▲ Collapse
| | | | Raghib Akhtar
India
Member (2017)
English to Urdu
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SITE LOCALIZER
It was a thesis of approx. 200000 words from English to Urdu. The thesis was related to education in India.
| | | | | Articles about music theory | Mar 4, 2016 |
Fresh out of college, I translated two articles by Pierre Schaeffer, the inventor of "la musique concrète."
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Greg Feehan
Russian Federation
Local time: 02:45
Russian to English
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My first paid translation out of college (that I can recall anyway) was a request for new metallurgical equipment, Russian to English. I regretted knowing next-to-nothing about metallurgy.
| | | | Klementina Shahini
United States
Local time: 19:45
Member (2009)
English to Albanian
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An Historical Album/book about Albanian National Hero, Scanderbeg(Skënderbeu).
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It was a business plan for a manufacturer of cargo cabins for pick up trucks. Something I would not touch now.
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