Matt Train, operations manager in translation company
I learnt Spanish at school and went on to do an undergraduate degree in Hispanic Studies. This allowed me to learn Portuguese as well, and I studied abroad in Brazil and Spain as part of the course. In my final year I took a translation course in both languages and found it very enjoyable. I knew that just having languages, although attractive to employers, was not really a vocation, so decided I wanted to specialise a bit more through further study. The MA course at Manchester ticked all the boxes for a new challenge that would further my skills and allow me to specialise before going out into the world of work.
The MA was the best educational course I have done. The emphasis on personal motivation and direction meant that for the first time in my education I was able to formulate my own essay titles on subjects within the field, tailoring my studies to the things that most appealed to me. That increased my motivation and scholarly appetite: I can remember spending hours in the library fishing around through book after book from all areas to find out what others had written on a particular Bible translation while coming up with an essay on the subject. It was that autonomy of study and the support and encouragement for it offered from the tutors that I most enjoyed.
Shortly before completing my dissertation I was offered a job at a traditional and reputable translation agency in Gloucestershire, so I moved there and worked as a Project Controller. This gave me a really good start in the industry, allowing me to see how elements of IT were used in practice, how translators received work and where they could be found when needed, and how clients approach translation. After answering a small ad on a translator website in 2005 I became involved in a new translation company called TranslateMedia in London, and left Gloucestershire in January 2006 to work full-time on that project. I am now the Operations Manager at TranslateMedia and have recently overseen the implementation of a Translation Memory system throughout the company, and its integration with an online workflow platform that I have been helping the tech team to develop over the last two years. I am also responsible for overseeing the projects team and all working processes within the organisation.
As a project/account manager, dealing with clients in a huge range of industries is one of the most interesting parts of the job. Translation can suddenly become a requirement in any industry, meaning that on any given day you never know who you will end up speaking to. I regularly work with clients at law firms, banks, embassies and insurance companies, but equally have worked on accounts for online gambling websites, advertising agencies, mobile-phone computer game production houses, and even sex-toy manufacturers.
As an operations manager the new technologies constantly appearing within the industry make it really exciting. Seemingly every month or two there are new translation memory tools introduced, new machine translation programs that threaten to replace human translators (and then, so far, always fail...) and then there are workflow tools. At TranslateMedia we are developing workflow technology on an ongoing basis, with the aim of automating as much as possible. There are four of us in the office here doing the same amount of work as nine of us used to do at my previous employer, as a result of the tools I am partially responsible for developing. It is quite a buzz knowing that we are doing something new and all of our own.