Rick Miranda

Question and Answer

• What is your name?
  • Rick Miranda
• Where do you live?
  • Netherlands
• What made you decide to become a translator or interpreter?
  • Necessity, but also the wish to keep up my languages. I translate part-time.
• List one strength that you think sets you apart from your colleagues.
  • Can handle automated translation tools easily owing to my software engineering background
• Name the one thing that you most enjoy in your translating or interpreting career.
  • Positive feedback
• 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.
  • One client kept nitpicking on the fee (which was low - 4 cents per word) and on translated items. He had corrections done to my text which were obviously wrong, demanded further rebates and argued endlessly about this word or that phrase.
    I then realized that some clients have a "bashing fixation", compelling them to complain ad nauseam and make a sport of bashing the translator. So I learned to avoid these strange types.
• 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?
  • Good question. Deliver in installments to new customers and be paid for each installment before proceeding to the next.
• 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.
  • Oranjoo spell checker. I was a spell champion at school, but my fingers slip up when I type and the spell checker is very good at finding these typos.
• What's the best book you've read this year?
  • Quantum Field Theory For The Gifted Amateur

Quantum field theory is arguably the most far-reaching and beautiful physical theory ever constructed, with aspects more stringently tested and verified to greater precision than any other theory in physics. Unfortunately, the subject has gained a notorious reputation for difficulty, with forbidding looking mathematics and a peculiar diagrammatic language described in an array of unforgiving, weighty textbooks aimed firmly at aspiring professionals. However, quantum field theory is too important, too beautiful, and too engaging to be restricted to the professionals. This book on quantum field theory is designed to be different. It is written by experimental physicists and aims to provide the interested amateur with a bridge from undergraduate physics to quantum field theory. The imagined reader is a gifted amateur, possessing a curious and adaptable mind, looking to be told an entertaining and intellectually stimulating story, but who will not feel patronised if a few mathematical niceties are spelled out in detail. Using numerous worked examples, diagrams, and careful physically motivated explanations, this book will smooth the path towards understanding the radically different and revolutionary view of the physical world that quantum field theory provides, and which all physicists should have the opportunity to experience.