Where are they now? (edition no. 1)

As summer approaches we thought it was a nice time to reflect back on where we are now, and where those who we have interviewed find themselves. For this first edition of "Where are they now?" we caught up with Hannah and Giacomo.

Hannah -

Our first interview with Hannah was in January 2017 and you can find it here.

Hi there Hannah, thanks for agreeing to be part of our “where are they now?” follow-up series on the blog.

We first interviewed you back in January 2017 when you told us all about your internship at the ETE section of the ECB. It was great to hear about your day-to-day experience and living in Germany.

So where are you now?

It’s all looking a bit different now! I’m back in the UK (and back in Leeds, where I did my MA), and working for the Department of Health and Social Care. I started out in a parliamentary briefing role (researching and writing briefing for debates, PMQs and Ministers’ meetings), but am now on a health policy career development scheme, which means I rotate through four different placements over three years, working right across the health and care sector. My current placement is in research policy, working on the UK’s medical research infrastructure. It’s been a very steep learning curve, but I’m enjoying it.

Can you tell us a little bit about an average day and how/if you use your language skills in your current role?

It’s quite hard to describe an average day, because the role is pretty varied. Currently, I’m doing a lot of project management, which is all about negotiation skills, being organised and building working relationships with key colleagues. I’m also doing some policy development work, where you start with a question or problem (e.g. how can we make sure medical research in England reflects the needs of the health system?), and then develop (and hopefully implement) solutions. I really enjoy this kind of work: it means getting away from emails and meetings for a few hours and doing some creative thinking.

As you’ll have spotted, I’m not using my language skills at all in my current role, and it’s been a while since I did any translating. My editing skills are a very useful asset, though! In Government, communicating clearly and effectively with the right people is particularly important, so drafting and editing skills are rightly valued very highly. I’ve found that studying interpreting has also prepared me well in areas like presenting confidently and being able to pick key messages out of specialist or political language. Also, the knowledge of European institutions I picked up during my MA and at the ECB has, dare I say it, come in useful when I’ve had to get involved in my team’s EU exit preparations.

How did your experience at the ECB help you get to your current position?

There were two main things I gained from my experience at the ECB, in career terms. The first was learning that I didn’t actually want to be a professional translator in the long-term. While it was a great opportunity, I learned that I should be looking for a more varied role with more scope for getting out of my comfort zone. I think it’s really important to be honest with yourself about what you enjoy, and the choices you need to make to get where you want to be!

Secondly, the ECB helped me get to my current role by showing me how rewarding working in the public sector can be. I knew that my next role would have to be about something more than driving a company’s turnover. At the ECB, it was playing a small part in the stability of the euro area. At the Department of Health and Social Care, it means knowing that my work is improving outcomes for patients in England.

How are you finding being back in the UK, are you glad to be back or are you missing Germany?

I’m really enjoying being back in the UK. Although I loved my year in Frankfurt, I was ready to come home by the end of it, and Leeds is a great place to be. But Germany will always be my second home!

Thanks for filling us in on where you are now – for those of you who want to remind yourselves of Hannah’s career path then check out the post from January 2017 here.

Giacomo -

Hi there Giacomo, thanks for agreeing to be part of our “where are they now?” follow-up series on the blog.

We first interviewed you back in May 2018 when you told us all about your work placement in Madrid and starting out after graduating from your MA in Bologna.

So what was your experience working with Alessandra like? Did this help you get to where you are now?

Hi, (Ele)! Thanks for getting in touch for a follow-up, it is always a pleasure to share my experience and make a potential positive impact on the people who are reading your blog.

I really enjoyed my work placement with Alessandra. I had the opportunity to work with an incredible professional who taught me a lot about the profession, not only in terms of mere translation or interpreting, but also in relation to being disciplined, organised and focused. She also shared with me some key aspects of the business, such as including the right clauses in your interpreting or translation quotes to make sure that you have your back covered at all times with clients, in case something goes wrong (e.g. service cancellation, upfront payment, documentation, amongst other things).

Once the placement ended, I applied the knowledge acquired to my work as a freelancer and I was successful on a couple of occasions (for example, I received an upfront payment for an interpreting assignment that I was contacted for with just a couple of days’ notice). On top of that, I realised that I am more focused and able to spend longer periods of time in front of the computer translating, if needed. Overall, I can definitely say it was a positive and rewarding experience that helped me to grow professionally.

Can you tell us about your current position at Deloitte? What does the job involve, what’s an average day like for you?

My story with Deloitte is kind of unusual, because it was a fortunate event that I was not expecting. An American friend of mine, who I met here in Madrid, was working at Deloitte’s EDC Cyber Security Operation Center (CyberSOC) as a translator. He told me that the service was growing and that they needed a new member to join the team. I was a bit doubtful initially, because it was a full-time position, meaning that I would have to put my freelancing career on hold. After some thinking, I decided that I couldn’t miss this incredible opportunity, so I applied. I went through the selection process both with Human Resources and the Translation managers and I was selected. On 11thMarch, I started my new job as an in-house translator specialised in Cybersecurity and IT.

Every day is a challenge, because we deal with very technical texts spanning from technical reports and services proposals to descriptions of vulnerabilities or specialised courses on Cybersecurity and related fields. In my case, this is topped off by another challenge: that fact that I work between English and Spanish, as Italian is not often in demand at the moment. This isn’t a problem for me, as I work with a native English and a native Spanish colleague who proofread everything I translate. As a matter of fact, the translation process in place in our department includes translation, proofreading and quality assurance as mandatory steps before sending off the translation to the client. This three-step process is an invaluable source of learning for me, which enables me to refine my writing skills and my style both in Spanish and English. The funny thing is that I often correct my two native colleagues on aspects of the language that I studied and know for a fact that they use incorrectly. I have always been obsessed with grammar and correct usage, after all. Still, I couldn’t ask for better colleagues: not only are they the nicest people I have ever worked with, but they are also very competent and meticulous at what they do. Their corrections and comments are always spot-on, which is how I can perfect my knowledge of the language and hone my translation skills in my two foreign languages.

We’ve seen that you’ve been featured on the “PAP - Traduzioni senza commissioni” Page on Facebook, can you tell us a little bit more about this? Are you managing to take on freelance work as well as your day job?

PAP – Parola Ai Professionisti, Traduzioni senza commissioniis a network of translators and interpreters that aims to pool the most talented professionals, both the most novice that have just started out on the market and the most experienced. The idea is to have teams of translators or booths made up of junior and senior profiles, for the former to learn from the latter.

The name means something like “Trust the professionals. Translations without fees”; the aim of this project—whose creator is Maria Laura Morgione, a conference interpreter with Russian, French and Italian graduated from the two most renowned schools in Italy, Trieste and Forlì— is to bring together interpreters and translators who want to make a leaving out of this profession and fight for dignified fees and decent working conditions, while ensuring direct communication between the professional and the client, without any intermediaries levying any fee on the service provided.

This network takes advantage of social media marketing to reach the largest number of clients possible. All its members are required to have an active role within it, either by writing articles related to the profession, which are then published on the website, or by being in charge of its operation (e.g. recruiting new members, managing social media pages, creating tests for wanna-be members, etc.). In my case, I am the go-to person for publishing articles on the website. My team and I receive the articles, read them to make sure that there are no typos or mistakes, improve their SEO and then make them available online.

PAP members have already completed interpreting assignments or successfully delivered quality translations for direct clients and agencies that found us on the web and trusted our image. I guess this means that we are doing a good job and that we can prove that being young is not always synonymous with poor quality work.

Thanks for filling us in on where you are now – for those of you who want to remind yourselves of Giacomo’s career path then check out the post from May 2018 here.