I follow a lot of translators via Linkedin, Twitter and various blogs. I do this to avoid silo thinking as well as to gain impressions from the outside world and to understand the market. During the pandemic, where conferences have gone virtual, Linkedin and Twitter have become useful conduits to continue discussion. They have allowed me to converse with other language professionals, even when physical events have ceased.
I was recently felled by acute hearing loss and tinnitus, coming at the end of a busy year. The doctors I went to really advised me to try to avoid noise as part of the recovery process. It meant that while off on sick leave I read a lot on my Kindle and avoided noise where possible (easier said than done with three lively children aged three to five). As part of the noise avoidance, I went to the supermarket in noise cancelling headphones, avoided public transport except for going to the doctors. I struggled most on the U-Bahn, particularly with the sound when a train comes out of a tunnel and goes into a station. Masked and with a hood up, I probably looked to all intents and purposes like I was definitely up to no good.
As we returned to presence working in July 2021, there was a major change from 2020. The previous summer, we were in in split shifts, meaning a week in the office, and then a week working from home in two fixed teams. The latter option meant less setting up and putting away of computers, but had the inflexibility that you only saw one half of your department. If there were two people working on a topic, they only ever saw each other virtually.
One tip from a friend gleaned during the first lockdown (March/April 2020) was to try to learn something new every day to help your work.
In September 1990, aged 13 I took the decision as I started at Taunton School (having previously been at its then boys only preparatory school (Taunton Junior Boys School)) to take German as a second modern language.
As a child I learned that an alarm clock was used to wake you up. But it took me a lot longer to realise that an alarm clock was a tool to send you to sleep and sleep more.
I turned 44 on 24 June 2021. The momentous realisation was that I was halfway between graduating (23) and retirement (65), and fortunately I had an excellent opportunity to take stock of things, giving a talk to a class of MA course Translation students at the Department of Translation Studies at the University of Graz at the invitation of Hendrik Bower.
After having worked from home for sixteen weeks, last week I was back in my “normal” office, in the room that I have worked in since 2014, since I joined my employer.
When I turned off the light in my office on the evening of 13 March 2020, I hadn’t anticipated that three months later I would be still working from home. Fortunately, we had always kept a home office “just in case”, but were in the throes of repurposing it to become a room for our twins. Then COVID-19 became an issue in Austria.
This year I have decided to try and take one term each week in German and the following week one in English for each letter of the alphabet to illustrate the diverse nature of my work as a Financial Markets Supervision Translator. I’m using the hashtag #AtoZFMST to do so.
The intention behind it is to introduce some of the key concepts of the job of an embedded translator in the supervisory setting. One reason behind this was because from talking to other people at recent conferences a number asked about the kinds of documents that are handled within the job, as it can be a somewhat arcane field of specialisation that seems impenetrable to an outsider.