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.