Professional Work Should Be Done by Professionals

In our last event, I joined it in the middle process and was asked to in charge of all issues related to foreign guests, which begun with invitation letters and ended with seeing foreign guests off at the airport. That’s my first time to be a leader in work and I needed to communicate with the Foreign and Overseas Chinese Affairs Office of Changsha Municipal Government, the Exhibition Management Office of Changsha Municipal Government, our partner Home and Abroad News Press, 20 English volunteers I recruited and leaders and staff from our own company.

Just as above mentioned, it’s my first time to be a leader, having no experience in dealing with government officers, foreign ambassadors and councilors who were invited to visit exhibition and conferences, so at first I had no idea what’s the right format of a professional official English invitation letter and didn’t know why it cost my colleague such a long time to apply an approval from the government departments. While later I assigned this task to a translation company, then I found out that what prevented us from getting an approval from the government departments was the informal writing style. Though my major is English, well I had never written that kind of letter before and since graduated from university, I seldom wrote English articles, let alone proof reading of translations. Well other leaders and colleagues in my company, they knew nothing or little about English, and the original invitation letter and some other promotion material were all translated by the freshmen whose English is just so-so and without any proof reading from a mature professional translator. No wonder it couldn’t meet the standards.

Later to my surprise, my boss asked me to be the simultaneous interpreter for Xu Dazhe, the General-governor of Hunan Provincial Government, when Mr. Xu was meeting with a group of 20 ambassadors and councilors from 17 countries located along the Belt and Road and delivering speeches at the following reception banquet. While me, I knew it’s a good chance, yet I had never be a simultaneous interpreter in such a grand occasion before and I also needed to manage the trip arrangement for the foreign guests group etc. I thanked my boss for her trust, but at the time she expressed the idea to me, I explained why I couldn’t do so and suggested to hire professional interpreters. She didn’t listened to me and I was worried about it. I came to other leaders and governmental officers for help, asking them to support my solutions. Through four times talk with my boss, she finally realized simultaneous interpretation was not as easy and simple as she thought and it’s serious because our clients are senior government officers, we couldn’t take any risks.

Recently I was asked to translate, revise and check the caption of the propaganda film of our rail transit expo. Since my boss was once very kind to me and I still remembered one time I had a business trip with my boss in a cold midnight last November, she upgraded my economic class seat to a first class one etc. So even though I knew it was almost impossible for only a person to do the translation, revise and check, I took the task and searched all information needed for the translation and asked all my familiars whose English are good to help me with the proofreading work. Yet at the final point, I still found some small mistakes or not so good usages. Having a look at my work as a translator in Shanghai Follow Me International Exhibition Company and my contact with all those Beijing, Shanghai or Changsha Translation company, I realized translation can not be done by a number of people whose English are good, on the contrary it should be finished by a group of careful translators that making of at least three people, one is responsible for the translation, another two for the proof reading and mistake correction. And in my following work, since I am the only translator in my company and leaders will gave other tasks to me, I will outsource translations of our company websites and event agenda etc to professional translation companies, while my duty is to check whether their translations are professional and spent more time to improve my own English by frequently and large amount of reading, writing, listening and speaking.