I’ll start with an analogy. When working as a young, in-house translator in Turin, I heard a story about a commercial sport fishing lake whose owners were mystified because customers never caught any trout even though the lake was regularly restocked. It turned out that years previously, the owners had put a handful of small bottom-feeding catfish in the lake to keep it clean …
I’ve spent periods abroad in Italy and Spain working away from my home office since the 1990s. It’s a way of getting to spend longer abroad than I would be able to just by going on holiday – and I can only spend so much time lying on a beach…
Visit translators’ forums and Facebook pages and you will invariably find discussions around the Catch-22 questions of how novice translators can gain experience and start specialising without being exploited, whether they should offer initial low rates to the dodgier agencies in order to gain precious experience and so on. This…
Back in the 1980s, when I was 29, I thought I’d retire in my late fifties. No particular reason, except that 57 was the random projected retirement age I put in the box when I started a private pension. My parents retired in their early fifties on teachers’ pensions. In…