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INTERVIEW:
Rodolfo Beneyto
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Q. How did you come to the translation business?
A. I lived in a multicultural environment since my birth. My mother was Romanian, my father Spanish and we all lived in Portugal, where I was born. Later on I moved to England to take my degree in Engineering, where I married an English girl. We had two children, one born in England and the other in Portugal.
I worked most of my life in the technical/commercial export field, for electromechanical, information technology and woodworking machinery companies in England, USA, Spain, Brazil and Portugal. To fulfil those functions, I travelled throughout 4 Continents, and got acquainted with different cultures and languages.
When I decided to work freelance in 1992, the obvious choice was make use of my language knowledge and I decided to become a translator. It was one of the best decisions of my life, and I must say that it fulfils me completely. |
Q. What was the most critical or challenging situation as a translator and how did you manage it?
A. Sometime ago, one of my best clients needed urgently an enormous amount of documents translated and proofread in a very short amount of time. I am very proud of the quality I provide, and in no way could I jeopardize that by rushing through the translation. The client had already contacted all their sources and couldn't find anybody available. They said they were counting on me as I had never let them down.
Fortunately, I belong to some very useful and professional translator communities online, and I managed to get together a group of professionals in a relatively short period of time. I divided the job amongst them but, as I was the one responsible for the final quality, I had to proofread everybody's work besides doing my own share of the translation.
The result was another satisfied customer.
Q. What was the funniest event in your career as a translator?
A. I'm afraid nothing very funny ever happened in my career. But since I became a translator and proofreader, my trained eye has been much more aware of the blunders done in some translation jobs. Some technical manuals I read are just so amateurish that they don't represent at all the companies for whom they were translated. Also, as in Portugal all films have subtitles and are nor dubbed, some of the translations are incredibly funny for their discrepancies to what is being said on the screen.
This is partly the companies' fault. They spend millions developing a product, setting up a marketing strategy or making a film and then they decide to save a few pennies hiring a low-paid inexperienced translator. |
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