Case study: Martyn - Senior Project/Training Manager

Martyn ended up working for a translation company more by accident than by design.

Having been knocked back by international businesses that he, like many recently-qualified Edinburgh University languages graduates, had wrongly assumed would be practically begging him to join their organisations, Martyn decided the next best thing would be to actually go back to live and work in the country whose language he claimed to speak.

Like most languages degrees, his had included a compulsory stay abroad in his penultimate year. Given the choice between enrolling at a French university and teaching English in a French collège, he had picked the latter, the idea of being paid to impart his solid-if-a-little-shaky knowledge of his native tongue appealing to him much more than scraping by as a student in a foreign land. Although the reasoning was suspect, the decision would prove the right one - the constant, day-to-day contact with the language (albeit at the level of a 12-year-old) and total immersion in the local culture (and bars) took him from stilted stammerer to confident conversationalist in just twelve months.

Total immersion in the culture and language allowed Martyn to soon become confident in the language

With this memory fresh in his mind at the end of his fourth year, he applied for a lecteur (university teaching assistant in France) post that his alma mater offered as part of an employment exchange with Metz University. The decision changed his life - the two years he would eventually spend in this hidden gem of a town were the most enriching he would ever experience, on a cultural, linguistic, professional and personal level.

As the teaching post was a fixed-term one-year contract, he needed something fresh to keep all that nice French food on the table - it was at this point he discovered Luxembourg, a haven for English-speakers looking for short-term work. Within a year in this strange little corporation of a country, he had worked as a proofreader (till three in the morning, most nights), an in-house language tutor (in a construction company; he even once gave a lesson on a building site) and an operator on a multilingual mobile phone helpline (despite not even owning a mobile).

Personal circumstances led him back home - upon arriving back in Scotland, he reflected that, whether he had meant to or not, all the jobs he had worked in up to that point had kept him in touch with languages, and had allowed him to use them on a regular basis. He realised that this was essential, no matter what he ended up doing. This led him back to the only language-related organisation constantly looking for staff - the multilingual call centre. Hardly a job of dreams, but it kept him in daily contact with francophone clients and colleagues, and eventually saw him run training courses for new recruits in French.

In this plethora of unrelated jobs, he had, without fully realising it, picked up the basic skills required for the translation company post he had originally coveted, and when the vacancy of project manager at Lingo24 arose, he did not need to be told twice (in any language).

He admits it has been a steep learning curve, but an extremely satisfying and fun one

Eighteen months later, Martyn admits that it has been a learning curve with the steepest of gradients. Although his degree had included translation modules, there were many basic things Martyn didn't know about this fascinating industry - from its own unfamiliar lingo ('target text' and 'language expansion' were two such phrases) to the fact that while Hindi reads from left to right, Urdu reads from right to left!

An exciting, satisfying job, it has given him the opportunity to work very closely with international companies and also to travel to parts of the world he knew little about before. He feels that he has gained a sound understanding of the translation process and industry, and has improved his organisational, persuasive and management skills along the way.

Martyn has four pieces of advice for those looking to get into (and remain in) the world of translation:

1. When starting out, spend time in countries where the language you are planning to work with is spoken. You will never acquire the necessary cultural knowledge of the country from books and the internet.
2. Stay in touch with the language in question through newspapers, radio, TV and film.
3. Become a true expert in your specialist subject, be it medicine, football or bookbinding. Your long-term aim should be to acquire a vast vocabulary in this particular area.
4. Finally, don't be discouraged if you don't get the ideal translation job at first; as the French like to say, there's more than one way to pluck a duck! A job in an international marketing company where you use your languages once a week is better than a position where these skills are never put to use.