Health and Safety: ergonomics for translators

Each job comes with its occupational hazards, and for translators posture is definitely one of them. The amount of time we spend working on our computers and sitting at our desks can have a real impact on our health, starting from our posture, to our eyesight or joints. While some of these issues might develop over time and their impact on our general health might not be apparent from the beginning of our careers, these sort of health issues tend to creep in and take a toll on one’s body.

That is why having a proactive approach when it comes to ergonomics is of the essence and why we should be very careful when it comes to hearing the signals our bodies are trying to send us. For instance, I have always been prone to lower back-ache, due to the fact that one of my legs is longer than the other. The pain usually came and went, and tended to be caused by intense physical effort. However, a couple of years ago, I started to notice that the pain was more and more frequent and it mainly affected me when I was at work, sedentary on my chair. The pain became more and more unbearable and I started to simply see it as “normal”, that was just who I was, I had a bad back, end of. When I decided to give Pilates and yoga a go, I realised just how wrong I had been. Within 2/3 months, my back pain had basically disappeared and my Pilates and yoga practice had helped me improve my posture at my desk, making me realise just how much I tended to crouch over my desk, and making me try to correct my position, to make sure my back was straight, that my legs were always bent in a 90 degree angle compared to the floor, that my chin wasn’t constantly falling towards my chest. Pilates especially helped me strengthen my core, thus releasing pressure from my lower back and allowing me to carry on with my work without constantly having to get up or try and switch positions to alleviate the pain. I try to practise yoga and/or Pilates twice or three times a week, but improving our posture is also something we can achieve through aimed, targeted exercises at our desks, a couple of times a day (stretching, making sure our chairs are properly adjusted and that our eyes are at least an arm’s length away from our screens, investing in a standing desk). Practice makes posture perfect: we should not feel discouraged if our bodies try to immediately revert back to our slouching, crouching position, as it will take us time to teach our body what its correct posture is and until this becomes natural to us.

Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI) also seems to be part and parcel of our professions. RSI can sneak up on you as, at first, it might only present symptoms while we're performing repetitive actions, such as typing, but the aches and pain can become more constant and last for longer periods of time as the issue deteriorates. A good idea worth investigating in order to prevent the symptoms of RSI is investing in an ergonomic keypad and mouse (you can find some examples of these in one of our previous posts, focusing on gift ideas for translators). Here are some examples of Dos and Don’ts when it comes to preventing repetitive strain injury.

But ergonomics is about a lot more than just posture: our profession also puts a considerable amount of strain on our eyesight, which can cause blurred vision, give us a burning sensation in our eyes, or give us a headache. There are a great deal of exercises we could do to prevent eye strain. For instance, a good idea is to always remember to look away from our screens for a couple of seconds as often as we can, for instance every twenty minutes for twenty seconds (the 20-20-20 rule). Blinking quickly for 10/15 times in a row is also a good idea, and so is closing our eyelids and trying to rotate our eyes clockwise or counter-clockwise or to move them up and down. More tips and exercises to help you prevent eye strain are available here.

This is a mere list of suggestions and examples I find work for me but there is a lot more information out there regarding preventing these ergonomics-related issues. While professional advice should always be sought for dealing with existing problems, prevention is better than cure. Incorporating a long list of exercises into our daily office routine might not seem feasible, but what I have found is that my “ergonomics breaks” never take me more than five minutes at a time and they always help me rest my body and my mind, so they increase my productivity in the short term, but also in the long term, as they are hopefully helping me prevent problems such as repetitive strain injury. I usually keep a list of exercises/yoga and Pilates poses divided into categories (according to the specific problem they tackle) so I can quickly pick a couple off the list instead of having to think of what I would like to do or search for tips online, and I make sure I add “ergonomics” as an item on my to-do-list, that I have to tick off each and every day.

Other simple changes we could make to avoid being idle and feeling the side effects of being glued to our desks (thus, risking eye strain, ruining our posture, and extenuating our brains) include:

standing up when we need to take/make a phone call
keeping some resources/dictionaries/glossaries/our phone at the other side of our office
using a small-ish refillable water bottle, that we will need to fill up in another room every now and then
learning keyboard shortcuts to minimise mouse clicking and repetitive movements of our hands and wrists
doing stretching exercises twice a day