English in a global context: from TEFL to translation

There are many ways to win the birth lottery, from genetic advantage in abilities or looks, to holding a powerful passport. But one it's easy to overlook - as a fish may overlook water - is the fantastic good fortune of being born with English as a first and native language.

It's probably not until you leave that native environment, that you realise what a gift it is, to have effortlessly acquired such an in demand skill, that others will pay for it. Even with no training or certification whatsoever, native US and UK English speakers can earn a few dollars an hour doing conversation classes online, and those who actually take the time to get properly certified (i.e. learn how to TEACH English, rather than just know it,) can do a lot better. Especially if you share my generation's experience, of never having learned English grammar in school in the first place, because it was unfashionable to teach it that way - honestly, I thought 'adjective' was a French word for about a year.

My guest on this week's Future is Freedom podcast, Russ Pearce, did his TEFLing the right way, though. Qualifying properly to start with, and gaining diverse experience in general and business English teaching, before combining this skill with his former professional expertise in aviation, to create a deeply niched specialist offering in demand all over the world.

It's a great episode - do have a listen, and let me know what you think.

Aviation + TEFL = unique niche lifestyle business, it's an example of what James Altucher calls 'idea sex'!

It also reminds me weirdly and geekily of multifactor authentication. What happens when you blend something you are, with something you know, and add in something you create... You get an unbreakable combination, that's what.

You can't go ahead and duplicate what Russ did, unless you have an identical CV, but you might just be inspired to identify your own unique fingerprint of assets, you can combinet o create your own freelance niche.

Russ and I also talk about translation and localisation, and how that can go wrong - even though the astonishing tech tools we now have our fingertips are quite phenomenal, and have changed so much - according to my Facebook memories earlier this week anyway, when a decade ago, accented characters were sufficient to render them comically useless:

Today we can combine speech recognition with near-instant cloud-based translation processing, to render live multilingual captioning, or conduct a conversation via a free app with a total stranger when you have not one word in common, it's pretty amazing.

Though if you're selling something like luxury villas, it's probably worth engaging a native speaker to check over the translation, just for sense and meaning, at least before you go and print it on a massive billboard or something...

But at least they tried, and indeed why should they bother, in Spain, to translate an ad into English? Well, because the stereotype of the monoglot expat in their coastal enclave has a mortifying level of truth to it. And just because the world bens over backwards to accommodate our weakness, it's no excuse for us Brits to continually fail to match up to the efforts of those engaging TEFL students all over the world, and simply not bother. So this summer I am determined to kick my own lazy Spanish up to C level, by committing to a daily sprint, especially while the podcast takes a season break.

Right, that's out there now, in black and white pixels.

Because the trouble with all this tech, is it covers up our own limitations, and makes it too easy not to bother. It's like navigation and mapping, making us all blunder through life not knowing where anything is any more, never mind how to read a map (coming across an ancient London A-Z recently was an intriguing experience for my GenZ offspring.. who are still trying to work out where we went when you got to the edge of the page...)

And honestly, there are aspects of second-language life I almost enjoy - like the excuse to grab a bilingual daughter to make a difficult phone call, or to feel impervious to marketing messages and other subliminal influences, which simply don't work when you have to translate them.

This effect exists to the extent that I find myself buying skincare brands in Duty Free or UK, because the advertising waffle-bollocks about sera-peptide-anti-transformative-natural-whatever ingredients and results du jour (see what I did there?), are so ineffective when filtered through the second-language bubble, that I can't bring myself to spend the money when I'm at home.

Until next week, to your freelancing freedom, and global communications. Enjoy!