If Ebenezer Scrooge was a translator

Blog post by Laura

Or how to keep the good Christmas vibe all year long

This year’s Christmas is gone, but that doesn’t mean that its glitter, joy, good deeds, generosity and kindness cannot be with us for all of the next year. It’s a thought I have for a long time, ever since I realised that many people tend to be more generous only before Christmas (or other holidays). And in the rest of the year, they’re like… well… mini-Scrooges.

And the more I think about it, the more I realise that the same happens in our profession. I heard a lot of stories from my fellow translators about good clients that slipped through their fingers only because of defective communication (or should I say pride?), about terrible translations resulted from the lack of time to work or the lack of revision from a specialist or a reviewer (or should I say greed?), about desperate clients who needed help with a translation and who received a slammed door in their face instead (or should I say arrogance?).

We all have a little cold-hearted, selfish Scrooge inside now and then, but I’m sure it takes less than 4 ghosts of Christmas to melt our translator’s hearts and to become the best professionals we can be.

We only have to find the empathy hiding inside our hearts, the courage and the acceptance to ask a reviewer or another translator to collaborate, the nudge to get out of our offices and go to conferences and meet new fellow translators, the wisdom to specialise in several domains and provide good translations, the kindness to help a client even if you are not qualified to do the translation they need, the dignity to recognise you made a mistake and fix it.

Let’s keep Scrooge out of our hearts and continue with the good Christmas vibes even after the holidays are over!