Roberto Veiga, TransPerfect Translations

Financial Times - May 30, 2010

We do a lot of corporate work – it can be anything from short press releases to full websites. Last summer we did a big merger project which involved web, financial reports and even internal e-mails – that was over a million words. Obviously there’s a lot of sensitive information with projects like this and we have to sign confidentiality agreements.

I’ve been working as a translator for 10 years. As a translator, you’re not an expert in any particular industry. Rather you need an overview of a number of sectors and you have to be able to familiarise yourself with different industries quickly. To get a feel for an industry’s specialist vocabulary, we’ll read the magazines and papers for the sector in question.

The most common translations are Figs (French, Italian, German, Spanish) into English and Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Russian. But we’ve also had Xhosa, Zulu, Tongan and Hmong. For common languages we have in-house translators, but for more unusual languages we have a database of freelancers.

It’s quite a pressurised job. Translation often needs to be done very quickly.