Practising

I’ve done the practice translation and the trial proofreads. They’ve been sent back and I’ve had confirmation that they’ve been received. Now it’s time to try and calm myself down. Time to breathe. Time to get over being a nervous wreck.

The work itself wasn’t too bad. The translation was quite nice, about a bar in Berlin. The proofreads were a little more technical but short and well translated. I’ve had worse proofreads during my internship and done harder translations for my Master’s.

I finished the translation half an hour before I needed to, then spent another 20 minutes checking it over and over, making sure there were no silly mistakes, checking Google to see whether those words really can be placed together in that order. I finally sent it back 10 minutes before they had asked for it.

I was then sent two texts to proofread. I had about an hour and 40 minutes to do them. 45 minutes before I was supposed to send them back I had read through both of them, listed all the mistakes and was starting to wonder what I’d missed. Did they really expect it to take that long or were they just making sure I had plenty of time? And if they really did expect it to take all that time I was sure I must have missed something. Some huge, glaringly obvious mistake perhaps. Or maybe I’d managed to overlook a page, somehow thought the texts were shorter than they actually were. I forced myself to move away from the computer, get a drink of water and take some deep breaths. I came back to find that the text really were that long and there really weren’t any more mistakes. I sent it back 20 minutes before they had asked for it.

So that’s it. All done. I guess I’m one step further on the road to finding a job. Now I suppose I just wait and see what happens next.

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