Ramon Somoza 
西班牙
Local time: 16:55
 正式会员 (自2002)
Dutch荷兰语译成Spanish西班牙语
+ ...
|
I worked *only* as a freelancer between 1977 and 1982. I then got married, wanted to have some stable income so I joined an aerospace company as full-time translator, though still doing freelance work. I still work on a regular job (but now as an engineer), then translate in my free time. As I travel a lot, I take my laptop with me and fill the long evenings in the hotels with my translation work (you can't -or should not- hang out up to 200 days/year around a bar  ).
In the old days, before the advent of laptops and even PCs, it was more difficult to handle these things, as you had to go physically to pick up and deliver the work. And of course you could not travel around with a typewriter (though I had a portable one). I set up my first e-mail system (with a 300 Baud modem) around 1986, and hardly used it for these activities, there was not one agency in the world that had something like e-mail. Internet as such did not even exist, I used the UUNET.
Nowadays it's of course different. With powerful laptops and global communications, I've traveled around the world (literally) and none of my clients was even aware that I was in France, Germany, UK, Saudi Arabia, USA or Korea, or why I was there in the first place. (Only inconvenience: Sometimes you get phone calls in the middle of the night from someone who is convinced that it's noon at your homebase so you should be awake...  )
My customers know I work in the aerospace industry, and that I am therefore not available 24h a day. In which company I work is, as Narasimhan says, none of their business. (BTW, in my full-time job they know I do freelance work, but as it has absolutely nothing to do with what I do there, they do not -and should not- object about what I might do in my free time). And as Kevin points out, it's the available capacity that counts. I am pretty productive, but of course sometimes I have to reject jobs. It might be because I am busy with another translation, because I have to take a plane and cannot take the job... or simply because I am finally home and want some time with my family. But it's none of my customer's business why I am or not available.
And regarding the accumulated experience, looking at all my language pairs and all the work I've done since 1977, plus all the software developer and aerospace engineering experience I've accumulated since 1982, I get a few centuries of experience... hmmm, Narasimhan, I kind of like your method of calculating experience, but even so it will be difficult to attribute it to overtime, as today I'm becoming only 52... ).
 
| | | |
The translation workplace 
