{"id":46330,"date":"2016-11-10T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-11-09T15:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gengo.com\/uncategorized\/hall-fame-christine\/"},"modified":"2019-10-23T17:59:17","modified_gmt":"2019-10-23T08:59:17","slug":"hall-fame-christine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gengo.com\/community\/hall-fame-christine\/","title":{"rendered":"Hall of fame: Christine"},"content":{"rendered":"Another polyglot gets the nod and enters the Hall of fame this year. Originally from Vancouver, Canada, Christine is a French, Portuguese and Spanish to English translator whose exposure to different cultures and languages has contributed to her accomplishments as a <\/span>Gengo Wordsmith<\/span><\/a>. She advises newer translators to always invest sufficient time and effort in their work, no matter the earnings.<\/span>\r\n\r\nWhat languages do you speak and what are your experiences with learning them?<\/b>\r\n\r\nFrench was the first foreign language I learned\u2014I went on a three-month exchange and summer bursary program while I was in high school, and then lived in Quebec for eight years during university. When I was around 30, I learned Spanish on my own to be able to do medical work in Latin America. Afterward, I did online courses and read a lot in Spanish. I now find Spanish a much easier language to work in. I\u2019ve also studied German, Latin, Biblical Greek, Tagalog, Portuguese, Inuktitut and Italian\u2014but often forget what I\u2019ve learned and have to relearn it, which is much faster the second time around. I\u2019m currently working on Portuguese. I use <\/span>Duolingo<\/span><\/a> a lot to practice translation and for fun, since I love translating.<\/span>\r\n\r\nWhat are your favorite translation tools?<\/b>\r\n\r\nWordReference<\/span><\/a> is my go-to tool, but I also use <\/span>Linguee<\/span><\/a> a lot. Whenever I come across a good specialized term bank\u2014for example, shoes or watches\u2014I add it to my favorites tab. And the <\/span>Government of Canada<\/span><\/a> has an excellent term bank for technical terms across English, French and Spanish. I don\u2019t use CAT tools much except through Gengo, just because I am not a full-time translator and don\u2019t want to invest in software.<\/span>\r\n\r\nWhat are your tips to become a Wordsmith?<\/b>\r\n\r\nMy only tip is to be very thorough all the time, right from the beginning. Even if a job has a reward of $0.16 and you have to spend 10 minutes figuring out the perfect term by searching for images or <\/span>Wikipedia <\/span><\/a>terms and comparing them in different languages. It\u2019s worth it in the end because the information you learn while doing it will add to your linguistic competence. There is no job that is beneath any of us. There will be lots of times that you\u2019ll lose money in the beginning to make money at the end. Like anything else, translation is an investment.<\/span>\r\n\r\nWant to become a Gengo translator?<\/strong>\r\n\r\n