Looking for guidance starting out after years away from languages

Chloë McQuarrie wrote:

My active language skills are not what they once were

Mervyn Henderson wrote:

I think you're very, very smart, Chloë, and you could probably do all this without a Dip Trans or whatever.

What I don't understand, given the times we live in, is your complaint about your current crust-earner being so "dry and dull". A lot of people, especially people with two young children, would surely kill for that these days, be it so dry and dull.

So why would you want to leave all that dry and dull behind, because your qualifications and experience must have been an earner in terms of promotion/salary, surely? Why jump into the unknown and shed what sounds like something safe and solid? Is there something you aren't telling us here? Could it be the other way around? Is the dry and dull leaving you, or about to leave you, or has it already left you?

I'm suspicious and cynical. It's what I do. But I don't think I'm the only one here wondering why.

[Edited at 2021-06-09 06:41 GMT]

Matthias Brombach wrote:


I'm sorry but when I read your posts, I read a perfect English which would already be the best prerequisite for your freelancer career. Start to gain some KudoZ points in your language combinations and you'll see, that the first offers will come in, no matter, whether they are qualified or not in terms of good payment etc. But that would be the second step you had to evaluate. Begin with the first, to become visible. The KudoZ ranking is the most important feature here at proz.com to become more visible to potential clients. And in the KudoZ section, you could already spot out what subjects you would be most comfortable with. It should be a subject you understand most. And most of the first jobs are also accompanied by a translation memory and even with term banks, which could offer you a helpful guide and where you could see, what quality your colleagues offer. Go for it, right now. Good luck!

Kay Denney wrote:



I was going to tell you that your previous jobs are your future specialist subjects and now it turns out you've been working in finance? I too find finance dull, however, it does tend to be better paid than my fluffy specialist subjects (art music tourism...). When I worked at the agency, we told our clients we had a pharmaceutical specialist in-house because the intern had worked in procurement for big pharma - he did know how to spell the chemicals at least. We also let him do a translation that was literally about rocket science... and told the client he was from Houston (that much was true and he did manage to do a good job, mainly because it was a text aimed at the general public).

Mervyn Henderson wrote:

And so I thought Aha, Chloë's been given the old heave-ho by C-Suite, but would rather not say so.



[Edited at 2021-06-09 16:13 GMT]

Catherine Howard wrote:

The book "Maintaining Your Second Language: Practical and Productive Strategies for Translators . . ." by Eve Lindemuth Bodeux is the best compendium of advice for not just maintaining your second (or third, fourth, etc.) language but also for reviving it. I got it when I could not afford to go live in the country where my second language was spoken in order to revive it after spending years translating from my fourth language. I decided to recreate the full-immersion experience of living abroad as fully as I could at home. With the internet, it's easier than ever to do so. I can't even count the number of suggestions I followed that allowed me to recuperate my language in record time.

The other book that revolutionized my approach to reviving my dormant languages and learning new ones is "Becoming Fluent: How Cognitive Science Can Help Adults Learn a Foreign Language" by Richard Roberts and Roger Kreuz. The authors discuss cognitive science research that debunks the widespread myth (which, alas!, many Proz.com members believe), is that adults have trouble learning new foreign languages. Not true! Adults have an advantage over children, which is that they've already learned how to learn. The only skill adults have trouble learning as easily as children is learning to pronounce words in a foreign language like a native speaker. Everything else? Adults are proven to learn faster and more deeply than children. It also helps adults when learning additional foreign languages if they learned one as a child, even if they forgot it, but the key is flexibility.

Another myth the authors disprove with cognitive science is the idea that the best way to improve your passive skills (listening and reading), if that's all you need to use, say, for translating, is by focusing on them alone. Even if translating in and of itself is a so-called passive skill, cognitive scientists have demonstrated that working on your active language skills is a far more effective way to boost your passive skills, since they get pulled along in the wake as you work on active ones.

Hope these eminently practical books help.