My favourite things to translate

I adore my job, but I’m not going to sit here and try and pretend to you that every project that falls into my inbox fills me with glee.

The actual act of translation is always a joy, which is why I’ve dedicated my professional life to it. But that doesn’t mean that the subject matter of each individual translation is always thrilling.

There are, however, quite a few different types of text that make my heart sing when I receive them. And, whilst as a professional I put 100% of my effort into every single translation I do, I do find that when I’m translating one of my favourite things the results are just that little bit superior.

I pride myself on all my work being of the highest standard, but projects I love working on just have an extra bit of sparkle about them.

After all, you can always tell, when someone’s putting their heart and soul into a piece of work.

Curious as to what puts a smile on my face? Here are a few of the translations I love to do.

• Newsletters:

Any kind of newsletter is always interesting to translate, as they normally focus on exciting developments or good news stories, and I often learn something new from them.

Whether it’s news about big companies, strategies, teambuilding events, recognition, involving employee’s families, helping the community, encouraging healthy competition, fostering a healthy workplace culture or networking, I’m always delighted when a newsletter gets sent my way for translation.

• Blog posts

As you might have noticed, I love blogging. As much as writing my own blogs, I spend lots of time reading and learning from other people’s blogs too. So, when blogging and translation combine, I’m in my element.

Blogs are normally written in a more informal manner than your average professional text, which means I can be a bit more creative with my choice of language for the translation.

• Client testimonials

What could be better than translating the words of happy customers?

It’s great to hear positive things about the brands I’m working with, and I love communicating a customer’s opinion in my mother tongue.

• Interviews

With most of my work focusing on translating written texts, which can sometimes be quite formal, it’s a nice change to translate someone’s spoken word and still capture the subtleties communicated.

What’s more, if someone’s being interviewed they normally have something of interest to say, so it’s a pleasure unlocking that information for a Portuguese-speaking audience.

•  Video captions

As I’m sure many of you know only too well, when you spend most of your working life staring at words on a screen, it’s refreshing to work with video captions now and again rather than just text.

The content of the videos is normally informative or entertaining, or both, and communicating the spoken word in short, subtitle-friendly sentences is a very different kind of challenge, but one I relish.