Invest in yourself

Nick Rosenthal FITI has over 30 years of experience working as a translator. Yet every year he continues to invest in himself through his continuing professional development. He explains why.

Maybe it’s my background as a cyclist: An understanding that to perform well on race day, we need to train. Regularly.  But as a translator, I’ve always felt that investing in ourselves is simply part of the job.  And yes, that means investing in professional equipment to do the job right, but it also means regular, ongoing investment in our professional skills.

To my mind, there are three core components that make up a translator’s skillset. The most obvious one is understanding the source language. Then there is the need to understand the subject area, so you can make sense of what the text is talking about, so you can follow the narrative, understand the argument that the author is making.  And then, finally, there is the often-overlooked skill of being able to write clearly, elegantly and sharply in your target language – in your own language.

There’s a fourth area, too: The skills relating to running your own business. And that could be anything from staying abreast of changes in financial reporting requirements for VAT or for tax returns (how many of us know that changes that the UK’s “Making tax digital” scheme will bring for us?), or it could be attending a course on negotiating skills.

It would perhaps be easy at my stage in my career as a translator to sit back, to stop learning, to not bother developing new skills or new ways of doing things.  I’ve got a 30-year track record, I’m a qualified MITI (and more recently, a Fellow) and I’m a past Chair of ITI’s Board. But I wouldn’t dream of it. For me, that constant learning, the pleasure of discovering new approaches, new insights, of building my understand and skills is absolutely fundamental.

And I’m delighted to see that over the past ten years or so, ITI has adopted a more holistic approach to Continuing Professional Development, or CPD. Once upon a long ago, we used to have paper booklets.  In the old days of tugging our forelocks, we’d get our boss, or a course tutor, so sign that we’d done a course.  Which is all well and good… but what if I spent a week in France or Germany, honing my language skills and keeping my cultural knowledge up to date? Should I get the local mayor to sign my booklet?  Nowadays, with ITI’s online CPD logging tool, I can simply take a sensible judgement about how many hours of CPD I should log for that stay in the relevant country (a couple of hours a day, perhaps?).

I also think it is good that we’re encouraged to log things like reading a good German Krimi as CPD, or watching Spiral in French on TV.  After all, language changes, evolves over time, and these keep our language skills current.  Perhaps I should also log reading a well-crafted English book, for my target language skills? And I certainly attend formal training courses, too – I spent a week on a very enjoyable literary translation course five years ago, which really got me thinking about how we write. And although I don’t do a huge amount of medical translation, the week-long medical translation course I attended in Lyon taught me a huge amount, but also allowed me to spend a week working in a professional French-speaking environment.

You can’t put a price on the value of that sort of experience. Other formal training I’ve done in recent years ranges from 1-day courses on the Machinery Directive, on industrial safety, and on business management and leadership.

Find what works for you – but invest in yourself!