Kimrey Batts

Question and Answer

• What is your name?
  • Kimrey Batts
• Where do you live?
  • Quito, Ecuador
• What made you decide to become a translator or interpreter?
  • While working in a small NGO as Projects Coordinator, I was called upon to translate various reports. In the process I realized that I enjoyed translating in and of itself, and thing went from there!
• List one strength that you think sets you apart from your colleagues.
  • A deep understanding of and appreciation for written Spanish, my source language (grammar, syntax, structure, flow).
• Name the one thing that you most enjoy in your translating or interpreting career.
  • Constant learning.
• 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.
  • Early on, I got a PDF with tons of formatting, handwritten text, stamps, etc., for which I was given an extremely tight deadline. I accepted because I needed the work, and I ended up stressed and unable to make the deadline, although I had convinced myself that I'd manage it somehow or other.
    Lesson: always be realistic from the outset, and just refuse something if there are doubts about feasibility.
• 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?
  • Ask for more - better rates, more reasonable deadlines. I feel as though I accepted a lot that was unfair and unreasonable because I thought that my lack of experience meant that I had no other choice.
• 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.
  • Trados 2014
• What's the best book you've read this year?
  • This Is How You Loose Her, Junot Diaz

Pulitzer Prize-winner Junot Díaz's first book, Drown, established him as a major new writer with "the dispassionate eye of a journalist and the tongue of a poet" (Newsweek). His first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, was named #1 Fiction Book of the Year" by Time magazine and spent more than 100 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, establishing itself – with more than a million copies in print – as a modern classic. In addition to the Pulitzer, Díaz has won a host of major awards and prizes, including the National Book Critic's Circle Award, the PEN/Malamud Award, the PEN/O. Henry Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and the Anisfield-Wolf Award.
Now Díaz turns his remarkable talent to the haunting, impossible power of love – obsessive love, illicit love, fading love, maternal love. On a beach in the Dominican Republic, a doomed relationship flounders. In the heat of a hospital laundry room in New Jersey, a woman does her lover's washing and thinks about his wife. In Boston, a man buys his love child, his only son, a first baseball bat and glove. At the heart of these stories is the irrepressible, irresistible Yunior, a young hardhead whose longing for love is equaled only by his recklessness--and by the extraordinary women he loves and loses: artistic Alma; the aging Miss Lora; Magdalena, who thinks all Dominican men are cheaters; and the love of his life, whose heartbreak ultimately becomes his own. In prose that is endlessly energetic, inventive, tender, and funny, the stories in the New York Times-Bestselling This Is How You Lose Her lay bare the infinite longing and inevitable weakness of the human heart. They remind us that passion always triumphs over experience, and that "the half-life of love is forever."