A meeting with young translators
by
Erhan Uçal
I recently had the opportunity to give a seminar to students of the Applied English-Turkish Translation Department at Çağ University, a foundation university located in Mersin. It was part of a seminar series with professional translators organized to allow prospective translators to learn from experienced ones.
It was a 1-hour meeting in which I introduced myself and talked about my educational and professional background, followed by a Q&A session.
I started my speech talking about my educational background and how and when I decided to become a translator. Moving on to my professional experience, I underlined the importance of starting a translator’s career at a translation office where a young translator is exposed to all kinds of commercial, legal, and civic documents including printed official forms, medical reports, marriage, divorce, and adoption certificates, commercial agreements, invoices, bills of lading, orders, shipment documents, NDAs, letters of undertaking, deeds of consent, etc. I touched upon the challenges faced by translators due to the fact that the language services sector is not a fully regulated one.
I then mentioned the qualifications required of good translators, who are supposed to be aware that learning a language is not only about learning words, but also learning the culture, history, and life in the countries where that language is spoken. I told the audience that a good translator is one with the ability to carry out quality research on the subjects involved in translation tasks, and who has the courage to divide a 1-page long sentence into tens of sentences to make it readable and understandable. I also advised them to learn a second foreign language, which definitely helps translators be one step ahead of their competitors. To their question about which language they should learn, I answered that it could be French or German, in addition to Russian and Arabic, which are currently very important locally in the area covering Mersin and Adana due to the fact that Mersin is home to one of the biggest ports in the Eastern Mediterranean, and that Russia and Middle Eastern countries are currently significant trade partners of Turkey, in addition to the EU.
The questions I received from prospective translators were about whether the translator’s profession could survive AI, the business areas with the most job opportunities, how they could specialize in certain fields, and how they should cope with complex and sometimes poorly written texts, as well as how they could prepare for their upcoming note taking and consecutive interpreting exams.
As a translator with nearly 20 years of experience gained in various sectors including banking and finance, agriculture and rural development, engineering, and education, I seemingly managed to impress the young translators who attended the event. I concluded my speech by saying that being one of the oldest professions, translation is fun, and translators will always be in demand as the world economy continues to globalize and many sectors in our country continue to internationalize with investments from all around the world.
