{"id":46182,"date":"2014-04-17T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2014-04-16T15:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gengo.com\/uncategorized\/faces-gengo-marina\/"},"modified":"2019-10-23T17:33:28","modified_gmt":"2019-10-23T08:33:28","slug":"faces-gengo-marina","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gengo.com\/community\/faces-gengo-marina\/","title":{"rendered":"Faces of Gengo: Marina"},"content":{"rendered":"
This week we\u2019re featuring Marina Khonina, an early Gengo translator and current member of our Translator Operations team. Before joining Gengo, Marina spent 12 years as a freelance translator and interpreter based in Europe and Central Asia. Today, she puts her love of translation and tech to use overseeing translation quality and Gengo\u2019s team of Senior Translators (STs).<\/p>\r\n
Tell us about your background as a translator and interpreter.<\/strong><\/p>\r\n
I grew up bilingual, speaking Russian from birth and learning English in my early teens, so requests to help translate or interpret started coming fairly early. My first official assignment was interpreting for medical doctors at a mobile humanitarian clinic in rural Kazakhstan. The thrill of seeing people from two different parts of the world understand each other through me as an intermediary had me hooked from day one.<\/p>\r\n
Conference interpreting, with all the pressure of delivering in real time, has always been my favorite. In recent years that\u2019s what I ended up focusing on the most. As a simultaneous interpreter, I had the chance to work alongside some amazing colleagues from the world over. Some other highlights included serving on an editorial team for a major dictionary and working with scholars to translate academic manuscripts and do multilingual research. I have a feeling I\u2019ll return to academia at some point in the future.<\/p>\r\n
I learned about Gengo soon after it launched in 2009 from someone I followed on Twitter and became a translator. I was a graduate student at the time, and doing a few quick translations in between classes and teaching helped me maintain my skills. In early 2010, I became an ST while still working as a conference interpreter with international organizations in Istanbul. Interacting with translators around the world was a welcome change from my high-intensity day-to-day interpreter work, and soon thereafter I made the leap to working full-time in Japan.<\/p>\r\n
I\u2019ve been in Tokyo for almost a year now. Working at a startup is sometimes as intense as being in an interpreter\u2019s booth (if not more!), but the experience is certainly worth it.<\/p>\r\n
Where have you lived?<\/strong><\/p>\r\nI was born in Almaty, Kazakhstan when it was still part of the Soviet Union. Later I spent some time (including two years of college) in the American Midwest. In my mid-twenties, my work as an interpreter took me to Kyrgyzstan, where I worked with international organizations while studying sociology.\r\n\r\nBefore moving to Tokyo, I spent five years in Istanbul, Turkey\u2014a breathtakingly beautiful city which is also perfect for exploring the Balkans and the Middle East.\r\n
Tokyo is certainly very different from the places I lived in before. What strikes me most about this city is just how livable it is. Another great discovery was the food. The linguist in me is also happy to explore the Japanese language.<\/p>\r\n
What do you do for Translator Operations at Gengo?<\/strong><\/p>\r\n
I joined Gengo to coordinate its diverse and globally-dispersed team of STs, who are industry professionals helping us select translators from thousands of candidates and check the quality of their work.<\/p>\r\n
I was fortunate to be involved in testing and refining the first tools that Gengo developed for quality checking, and my focus has more recently shifted to translation quality at Gengo. We face a unique challenge: quantifying something traditionally deemed subjective\u2014quality\u2014and doing that at scale. I feel very proud and privileged to be part of this initiative, and to have the amazing support of our 60+ ST team!<\/p>\r\n
What\u2019s your favorite thing about speaking foreign languages?<\/strong><\/p>\r\nOne of the best things about speaking foreign languages is meeting people, but I\u2019m personally most fascinated by written language. Apart from speaking Russian and English, I’ve also dabbled in French, Ancient Greek and Turkish and am currently studying Japanese.\u00a0The most frustrating thing about learning Japanese is that no matter how hard I study, I\u2019m still essentially illiterate because the gap between the written and the spoken language is so great.\r\n
Describe your office setup or workspace. What is the view like? What kind of scenery do you look at every day?<\/strong><\/p>\r\n
After enjoying a wide variety of sceneries as a freelancer (interpreter booths, commuter boats, secluded island gardens), I now look out onto a busy, open layout office in the center of Tokyo. It\u2019s exciting to work alongside a dynamic team, and being able to chat with our engineers or integrations specialists is unparallelled! When I have to do focus work, I can usually be found on the couch in the corner of the office.<\/p>\r\nJust outside the window, I can see the JR train line to Shibuya Station and the busy Tokyo cityscape.\r\n\r\n<\/a>\r\n
![\"faces09_marina_view\"](\"http:\/\/blog.gengo.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/faces09_marina_view.png\")
<\/a>\r\n