I was tasked with translating a Russian review of a book by an English rabbi, Lessons in Leadership: A Weekly Reading of the Jewish Bible. The book was in English, but the review had little to do with the original language: almost 80% of it were quotes from the Russian (!) translation of the book.
I needed to get my hands on the source, otherwise I would have had to do a back translation completely different from the original. And that would've been extremely unprofessional: the rabbi would not have even recognised his text in the review.
Not to mention that the chapter titles were to be written in Hebrew in English letters, and the Russian translation doesn't have them. So I asked the company to buy the book in English. I had it on my desk by the end of the week. I set to work immediately.
By the way, there was no printed version of the book available in Russia. We had to buy one and have it delivered through Amazon.
Being punctual, polite and diligent are Andrey’s superpowers.
He delivers documents within Moscow and sends them to other regions.
Once, a government agency lost the documents that we were working with, but Andrey insisted they find them. And they did!
Andrey's been with us since 2016, so we know we can trust him with anything.
For some people, we do everything that they think is tedious. Like notarising and legalising documents or having an apostille attached to them. We file them at different agencies, we queue at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Justice and the consulates. We pay duties. We make arrangements and ask the officials to hurry it up.
For some people, we spend nights translating documents that they hate having and seeing: anamneses, tests, types of tumour, CT and MRI transcripts. We play for their team. The team of survivors.
Tender documents, technical descriptions, tons of Cyprus statutory documents: virtually a sea of words and figures jeopardising the right to a nine-to-five job. Well, you can either drown in that sea, or you can stand up on a surf board and learn to manoeuvre.
Do you know what I enjoy most in my job? I would love to say something like, “tears of gratitude in clients' eyes.” But no.
There are never tears; paperwork is not something you want to be thankful for, especially if it leads to even more paperwork. It's around eight in the evening; the office is empty. It's erily quiet. I lean back in my chair and close my eyes. Because I know there’s someone waiting for me at home in the evening. The same way there are people waiting for me at work in the morning. And most importantly: I want to keep coming back to both places.