Larisa

Question and Answer

• What is your name?
  • Larisa
• Where do you live?
  • Russia
• What made you decide to become a translator or interpreter?
  • I became a translator because I love languages and with their help I like to help other people to know a foreign culture.
• List one strength that you think sets you apart from your colleagues.
  • Self-control
• Name the one thing that you most enjoy in your translating or interpreting career.
  • Coping with difficult texts
• We all have worked on those not-so-perfect assignments. Write about one such assignment that was not ideal and what you learned from it.
  • Once I agreed to translate a text without preliminary reading and it turned to be very difficult, besides, I knew nothing in the topic, thus the quality of my work was law. Since then I never take texts for translation without preliminary reading.
• If you could go back in time to when you were just starting out as a translator or interpreter, what advice would you give to your younger self?
  • Be more self-assured
• Name one resource – such as a phone app, CAT tool, website, and so forth – that you find especially helpful in your translating or interpreting work.
  • Deja Vu
• What's the best book you've read this year?
  • Blindness by Jose Saramago

A city is hit by an epidemic of "white blindness" which spares no one. Authorities confine the blind to an empty mental hospital, but there the criminal element holds everyone captive, stealing food rations and raping women. There is one eyewitness to this nightmare who guides seven strangers-among them a boy with no mother, a girl with dark glasses, a dog of tears-through the barren streets, and the procession becomes as uncanny as the surroundings are harrowing. A magnificent parable of loss and disorientation and a vivid evocation of the horrors of the twentieth century, Blindness has swept the reading public with its powerful portrayal of man's worst appetites and weaknesses-and man's ultimately exhilarating spirit. The stunningly powerful novel of man's will to survive against all odds, by the winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Mohamed Sorour

Question and Answer

• What is your name?
  • Mohamed Sorour
• Where do you live?
  • Tenth of Ramadan Ind. City, Egypt
• What made you decide to become a translator or interpreter?
  • In high school in Egypt, I used to enjoy the emergent pop music but could understand the lyrics. I realized then that proficiency in English shall open new doors in life. 
    I decided to learn English literature. After graduation in 1977, I was trained by my employers on business management; but I was inclined more to writing, editing and translating Arabic and English.
• List one strength that you think sets you apart from your colleagues.
  • My long time experience.
• Name the one thing that you most enjoy in your translating or interpreting career.
  • Self contentment
• We all have worked on those not-so-perfect assignments. Write about one such assignment that was not ideal and what you learned from it.
  • Original source language was Japanese, translated into English, and I was required to translate into Arabic. When I talked with the writer of Japanese text, I sensed different spirit in content of document. So, I totally changed my Arabic text. I learned to adapt.
• If you could go back in time to when you were just starting out as a translator or interpreter, what advice would you give to your younger self?
  • Feel the spirit of the text before you start on translation.
• Name one resource – such as a phone app, CAT tool, website, and so forth – that you find especially helpful in your translating or interpreting work.
  • None
• What's the best book you've read this year?
  • None

Djilali Naceur

Question and Answer

• What is your name?
  • Djilali NACEUR
• Where do you live?
  • Algeria
• What made you decide to become a translator or interpreter?
  • I love languages, and to know other cultures.
• List one strength that you think sets you apart from your colleagues.
  • I have a thorough knowledge of my mother tongue.
• Name the one thing that you most enjoy in your translating or interpreting career.
  • The final output in the target language
• We all have worked on those not-so-perfect assignments. Write about one such assignment that was not ideal and what you learned from it.
  • A text that looked like the original without having the characteristics of the target culture.
• If you could go back in time to when you were just starting out as a translator or interpreter, what advice would you give to your younger self?
  • Get a better mastery of foreign cultures and languages
• Name one resource – such as a phone app, CAT tool, website, and so forth – that you find especially helpful in your translating or interpreting work.
  • Matecat
• What's the best book you've read this year?
  • Indignez vous

Karin Saner

Question and Answer

• What is your name?
  • Karin Saner
• Where do you live?
  • Germany
• What made you decide to become a translator or interpreter?
  • First of all it was a love for languages, finding out how to express my ideas somehow differently when speaking another language. During several jobs I hold I always ended up with the translation work.
    So one day I decided I would love to do just this on a daily basis while really, really concentrating on what I do. So very slowly I got better.
• List one strength that you think sets you apart from your colleagues.
  • Finding the idea behind the word(s)
• Name the one thing that you most enjoy in your translating or interpreting career.
  • Conveying the idea behind the word(s)
• We all have worked on those not-so-perfect assignments. Write about one such assignment that was not ideal and what you learned from it.
  • While doing regular translations of marketing material Italian-German for a marketing company, this client used me as a dictionary 7/24. This taught me to be more precise about the services I'm willing to offer.
• If you could go back in time to when you were just starting out as a translator or interpreter, what advice would you give to your younger self?
  • Take translation very serious!
• Name one resource – such as a phone app, CAT tool, website, and so forth – that you find especially helpful in your translating or interpreting work.
  • The Translator's teacup
• What's the best book you've read this year?
  • History of the Rain by Niall Williams

Longlisted for the 2014 Man Booker Prize

We are our stories. We tell them to stay alive or keep alive those who only live now in the telling. That's how it seems to me, being alive for a little while, the teller and the told.

So says Ruthie Swain. The bedridden daughter of a dead poet, home from college after a collapse (Something Amiss, the doctors say), she is trying to find her father through stories--and through generations of family history in County Clare (the Swains have the written stories, from salmon-fishing journals to poems, and the maternal MacCarrolls have the oral) and through her own writing (with its Superabundance of Style). Ruthie turns also to the books her father left behind, his library transposed to her bedroom and stacked on the floor, which she pledges to work her way through while she's still living.

In her attic room, with the rain rushing down the windows, Ruthie writes Ireland, with its weather, its rivers, its lilts, and its lows. The stories she uncovers and recounts bring back to life multiple generations buried in this soil--and they might just bring her back into the world again, too.