On April 23, many countries celebrated International Book Day. Having a branch in Spain, it is a day we like to celebrate at Jensen Localization, since it is the day Spanish book lovers celebrate the death of their most famous writer, Miguel de Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote.
In our social networks we recommended a book to you related to the translation and interpreting industry, Found in Translation, by Natally Kelly and Jost Zetzsche.
As language and translation freaks, it is a book we of course like and we feel identified with some of the stories it features. But what we like most is that it explains with real and close examples how translation and interpreting are part of our routines and make our lives easier, like technology.
There are many surprising stories in this book. Probably, and due to the fact that in our company we deal with translation and not with interpreting, those that astonished us most were the ones related to interpreting. Examples like the interpreter of the Nuremberg trials, and the own example of Nataly working as a telephone interpreter in emergency calls show us how important it is for interpreters to keep calm at all times and not let emotions interfere in the job. These are just two of the many examples why not using professional interpreters and instead relaying these tasks in friends and relatives who have not enough experience can make you lose a trial or even miss an important business opportunity, as our colleague Eva Mª Díaz Puche explained us in the article Languages in Internationalization – Part 2. Using interpreting services for business meetings.
But there are funny stories too, like interpreters that help multilingual (and multicultural) couples and errors in the release of a product in a foreign market. Or do you think that Ikea was the first one to have sexy product names?
We are not going to spoil the fun for you of finding more examples of how our job is part of your life. Found in Translation pays tribute to the job of translators and interpreters in many different fields: literature, health care, law, natural disasters, software localization, advertising, and also in the way they can benefit from technology, with the more and more famous machine translation services. We think this is a book that will make each and every translator and interpreter proud of having chosen this profession, even if it is not always as appreciated as it should be.
We definitely recommend you, dear reader, to read this book. If you are part of this industry, like us, you will be able to identify with many of the stories gathered by Nataly and Jost. If you have nothing to do with our industry, you will now learn why we love it so much.
From this blog we would like to thank Natally Kelly and Jost Zetzsche for their hard work compiling all these stories, talking to colleagues all over the world. If you would like to learn more about this book, just visit their website, www.xl8book.com.
And just to finish with, a question for the authors. Can we expect a second part of this book? We would love to!
