Q. What was the most critical or challenging situation as a translator and how did you manage it?
A. About 8 years ago I was asked to translate from Italian into Russian a
lengthy document containing draft articles of association. The customer was
ready to pay much but the work was extremely urgent. I understood the text
but it was the first time I ever saw company articles of association in
Italian and the meaning of some phrases was unclear for me. No Internet
connection then, nobody to consult with. Frankly speaking I don't know
how it was done. I began to hurriedly type a rough copy,
working semi-automatically and putting asterisks instead of words I
didn't know or after the phrases I didn't understand well. When the
"pre-translation" was ready I printed it out and after some struggle and
library search I managed to delete the asterisks several minutes before the
deadline.
Q. What was the funniest event in your career as a translator?
A. The funniest translation-related episode in my life has so far been answering
a translation question in the Internet (a sentence was to be translated from
Russian into English). The problem was that the sentence had been written by
hand and the fellow who asked the question didn't know Cyrillic letters and
"copied" the Russian handwriting using Roman alphabet. Though I couldn't
decipher the entire sentence for sure, I managed to get its general meaning. |
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