Being a busy masters in translation studies student didn’t stop Shweta from becoming a Gengo Wordsmith. Now that she’s made it on our esteemed roster, she wants to remind fellow translators that when accepting jobs, it’s better to make quality, and not just quantity, a priority.

What languages do you speak and what are your experiences with learning them?

English, Hindi, Tamil, Spanish and French are the languages I’m familiar with, but I only really speak (and think) in English. I started learning Spanish and French when I was in college.

Apart from classes, I also spent a lot of time watching movies and TV series in the two languages, which helped a lot in understanding the different accents. My Spanish really improved, however, when I began interning at the Consulate of Ecuador in my hometown. I was given a number of translation projects and I also had to converse in Spanish with native speakers.

Currently, I’m doing my masters in translation studies at Cardiff University. Learning translation as a discipline has actually helped me appreciate each language for its own intrinsic and cultural value more than learning the language did.

What are your favorite translation tools?

I use Google Translate and WordReference for a lot of Gengo jobs and I’ve also been introduced to Phrase TMS through Gengo. ProZ and other translation forums are also very useful for specific terminology. I’m currently learning SDL Trados Studio at university and I can definitely see myself using that in the future.

What are your tips to become a Wordsmith?

Because of my language pairs, I constantly get jobs and could have easily hit the 500,000 mark months ago. But not only would that have affected my quality, but also my decision to become a professional translator. I believe a very important part of being a translator is the ability to say “no”. I need to know my own limits, be it in terms of expertise, time or workload.

When I was working, I made it a point not to rush home and log on to Gengo, tempting though it was. I’d take my time to eat, relax and ensure I was focused before I started a new job. I also found it very helpful to take short breaks in between. I’d watch some videos or listen to music—anything to refresh myself.

But most importantly, you just have to work at it. When I first read about becoming a Gengo Wordsmith and the number of words I would need to translate, it was pretty daunting. But I set a goal of translating a certain number of words per day and I made sure to follow it through.

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