Hello everyone,
I just joined WSO. Would really appreciate your perspective because it would help me to get a better idea of how to tailor my business and skills going forward.
I work in financial and legal services as a translator. I'm also currently doing an Msc in Finance and Financial Law part-time while I continue to work. I already have close to 10 years of experience as a translator but mainly through translation agencies, who do the client acquisition but don't actually have any or enough translators in-house. I'm trying to see if I can get work directly with banks and law firms and be less dependent on agencies.
As people who are actual practitioners in banking, if you have had contact with translation issues as part of your work, do you typically prefer to work with a large agency or do you (also) work with individual, trusted translators? Or is it mostly done in-house? I'm trying to figure out if it would be better for me to go to the trouble of setting up an agency or not. I know one or two people who work solo with banks/law firms and don't even outsource or share work I think, but maybe that is a rare position to be in. I know one of them started off working in-house at a bank. I never worked in-house at a bank or firm. I'm trying to make inroads by attending conferences. I attended my first one recently and I made some good contacts. Of the people I met, one or two were sceptical and mentioned bad previous experiences with translators. One was highly positive. Most were neutral in the middle or too polite to express anything else.
What do you think about translators generally? Is translation something relatively unimportant or do you actually suffer if they are not done properly? One thing that surprised me at the conference was that someone mentioned during their lecture that all the translations for a case were rubbish and they couldn't read them, so they just found some other solution that didn't require those documents. He said that like it was normal for translations to be rubbish. I'd appreciate any insights, thanks.
Hi suzi111, just trying to help:
Calling relevant pros to the rescue! ckochard Metsa raymond.r.hedberg
Hope that helps.
Thanks Monkey Bot! I hope the pros share their insights :)
Most non-english cross border deals will include the relevant "country team" who will generally do any translation or have their in-house team do it at larger banks. I don't believe one off contracting is common
Thanks orangemarker. Do you know anything about cross-border deals where the documentation needs to be translated into English?
I translate into English from three other languages that are major jurisdictions (don't want to specify here or it will be pretty easy to identify me). I find that the demand is very high (via agencies) for someone external who can write and draft in excellent English, since many banks or law firms have multilingual staff but then in certain situations they need someone who is going to write properly in English, e.g. if pleadings have to go to court or to an arbitration tribunal, relevant documentation from the past in a cross-border issue is not in English for the English lawyers to look at, etc.
I know less about what happens in banks, but for example I know one financial translator who gets paid very well as an external into-English translator of corporate communications, pitch books, etc. I think she is more on the semi-marketing side of things.
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