My career start as a freelance translator was rather bumpy. I was, however, a pivotal time for me. Today, in the fourth article of a series celebrating my 25 years in the translation industry, I’ll share memories and insights from my career start as a translator in the 1990s.
Table of Contents
Translating as a secondary source of income
After completing my training as a translator at a vocational school in Brazil, I saw the same thing happening that I already knew from career guidance in school: employment as a translator was hard to find. Moving to South Brazil, where the job market offered better prospects, was out of the question at the time. So I had to be creative and sought other kinds of jobs in which I could apply my language skills.
First, I was employed as a ship chandler, selling goods and food to international ships docked at the port of Salvador. Then I worked as a freelance English teacher, initially just for private individuals and later also very successfully for a local language school. Finally, I was hired as a travel agent at a large hotel that was a famous destination for international tourists – mostly from Germany. During all these stunts, I was able to use and practice my English language skills, while learning German at the Goethe Institute and self-learning Spanish.
Positioning myself in the translation industry by specialising
In all those years, I never gave up translating. Instead, I tried everything to get translation jobs: placing ads in the largest regional newspaper, passing out advertising flyers at the university campus, attending trade fairs and events to network with potential customers, and sending my CV to as many companies as possible. But all that wasn’t enough to gain a foothold as a freelance translator. At least not immediately. After all, the market was already saturated with English to Brazilian Portuguese translators.
Despite the difficulties, I did acquire a few good clients – mostly local industrial companies – who sent me many exciting projects throughout the years and enabled me to specialise in industrial engineering and quality management terminology. Of course, I could only accept such relatively large translation projects when I was not (or no more) under full-time employment.
Specialising in the two fields mentioned above and adding German to my working languages (after returning from Germany and gaining a German language certificate from the Goethe Institute) were key to positioning myself as a freelance translator in the local job market.
Gaining career momentum from being mentored
However, the eureka moment in the beginning of my career only came after almost 6 years of working as a freelance translator. I was asked by a former teacher of mine from the Goethe Institute, who was also a court-certified translator, to help him with certified legal translations from German into Brazilian Portuguese and vice-versa.
We had already worked together translating academic texts from Germany, but now the idea was working together on a daily basis at his office. The invitation had a perfect timing, because shortly before I had quit my job as a travel agent in order to study philosophy at the university. Now, my daily routine was structured around attending university in the morning and translating legal documents in the afternoon.
The job offer gave me the chance to tap into a completely new working subject and put my translation skills to the test every day, as my translations were proofread by an experienced legal translator. For that reason, I consider those years as an assistant to a sworn translator as a mix of (paid) hands-on professional training with a menteeship, which in turn made my career really gain momentum.
As a result, in 1999, I started a new main working subject (law, whereas until then it was business/finance, industrial engineering and quality management), a new working language (German, added to English and Portuguese) and a new field of work (certified translations). I had finally found a niche that was not only fun to work in, but also was clearly in demand on the local job market. For me, this was the end of translating as a secondary job – from then on I was a full-time translator. To learn more about the time I spent as an assistant to a sworn translator and later as a Brazilian sworn translator in my own right, read the next article of this series.
