{"id":46289,"date":"2015-11-09T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-11-08T15:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gengo.com\/uncategorized\/hall-of-fame-miriam\/"},"modified":"2019-10-23T17:52:49","modified_gmt":"2019-10-23T08:52:49","slug":"hall-of-fame-miriam","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gengo.com\/community\/hall-of-fame-miriam\/","title":{"rendered":"Hall of fame: Miriam"},"content":{"rendered":"A dedicated and highly proficient translator in our English and Italian as well as English and French language pairs, Miriam became a multilingual by chance and by choice. From a teenager translating for fun to an <\/span>ATA<\/span><\/a>-certified professional, she believes that the combination of academic learning and everyday practice is highly valuable for a career in translation.<\/span>\r\n\r\nWhat languages do you speak and what are your experiences with learning them?<\/b>\r\n\r\nAside from English, I speak three languages: French, Dutch and Italian.\r\n\r\nFrench was the first language I studied, thanks to my grandfather. When I was 13, he took me to France and insisted that \u201cno granddaughter of his would be an ignorant American traveling without knowing the language\u201d and paid for French lessons. I studied it throughout high school and college, but didn\u2019t apply it to my everyday life until I met a guy from Burkina Faso (17 years after the last time I\u2019d studied French) whose opening line was \u201cTu parles fran\u00e7ais?\u201d (do you speak French?). He is the father of my six-year-old daughter. I always say she would never have been born if I\u2019d studied Spanish like more practical Americans do. Now my West African French is fluent, and I know a lot about luxury fashion terminology in French, thanks to working on <\/span>Vestiaire Collective <\/span><\/a>jobs for Gengo. \u00a0\u00a0<\/span>\r\n\r\nIn high school, I spent a year in the Netherlands through the <\/span>AFS Intercultural Programs<\/span><\/a>. It was a full-immersion program and I lived with a family and attended high school in Dutch (you don\u2019t know real boredom until you go to a two-hour biology class in a language you don\u2019t know). I learned Dutch very quickly and was fluent by the end of the year (though without a solid academic basis). Now it\u2019s most useful as a party trick to impress people. I visited my host parents often over the last 25 years, but my Dutch is naturally quite rusty. It\u2019s interesting though that comprehension remains almost constant, whereas production makes me sweat. When I try to study new languages now, like Spanish or Dioula (a West African language), I miss having the absorbent mind of a 16-year-old. I used to translate Dutch to English for fun, which was the origin of the idea of becoming a translator.<\/span>\r\n\r\nI studied Italian in college and spent my junior abroad in Florence, where I return often. I became an Italian-to-English translator in 2000 and became certified by the <\/span>ATA<\/span><\/a> in 2001. I learned Italian both academically and in practice, both of which are useful for translating.<\/span>\r\n\r\nMy full translator story can be found <\/span>here<\/span><\/a>.<\/span>\r\n\r\nWhat are your favorite translation tools?<\/b>\r\n\r\nI use <\/span>CafeTran<\/span><\/a> as a CAT tool but, at the end of the day, nothing beats <\/span>Google<\/span><\/a> and its many features. I find image searches handy for product descriptions like those I do for Gengo. I find Google searches helpful in distinguishing between what is \u201ccorrect English\u201d and actual common usage.<\/span>\r\n\r\nWhat are your tips to become a Wordsmith?<\/b>\r\n\r\nThis line stuck with me from a recent\u00a0<\/span>New York Times<\/span><\/i> article<\/span><\/a>:<\/span>\r\n\r\n\u201cA good metaphor for the act of translation is akin to the attempt to answer the question \u2018What player in basketball corresponds to the quarterback?\u2019\u201d\r\n\r\nTo translate well, you should know the rules and habits of both the source and target language. And you have to accept that things are always lost and gained in translation, which as <\/span>Umberto Eco<\/span><\/a> says, is the art of \u201csaying almost the same thing.\u201d<\/span>\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nWant to become a Gengo translator?<\/strong>\r\n\r\n