Whether you know me or not, thanks to the Internet it takes very little to validate that I am a
professional translator – an entrepreneur, a gig economy worker. I’m not embarrassed to say
so, and I am indeed proud that I have found my share of contract jobs on the likes of Odesk.
That said, depending on your own experiences, it probably won’t surprise you that not all of
my work is actually translating (or proofreading with a multilingual bent). In this article I
discuss two of my most irregular jobs in my career, both of which I completed recently.
Number one: I have acknowledged this job as grading machine translation output; there were
650 “units” and for each one I read a sentence in French put to me along with four already
compiled English translations that were the work of machine translation tools. There was
definitely never any of this when my father was my age; the industry has definitely recently
changed in some respects! Frankly, that alone makes me wonder just how many examples of
machine translation software there are in this world today, but I’m nevertheless confident that
Google Translate is the best, most likely by far. (That’s probably what you think as well,
right?) I’ve already started to feel like a traitor to my profession for doing work like this;
maybe I would be happier in another line of work right now.

The second entry is a job which involved me doing monolingual English proofreading (and
yes, English is my mother tongue, just in case you are in any doubt) of a non-fiction book
made for children about learning languages of all things. I ended up accepting this one and
seeing it through to the end even though it covered not just the two foreign languages I
translate from professionally (French and German) but also multiple ones I don’t, including a
couple with non-Roman script (Arabic and Japanese). Basically, the woman who wrote this
book provided translations of lists of individual words in multiple languages (mainly numbers
and the days of the week and the months of the year and things like that), although there also
were points where she provided single sentence explanations of this, that or the other in
English and in whatever language was the subject in that particular part of the book. I was
intrigued: even I, with a university education, only translate from two languages
professionally, and from the start I just didn’t believe that this woman actually spoke seven
languages fluently when she’s not even in my business. As it is, whatever provable
proficiency in foreign languages she did have, she admitted to me that she leaned on Google
Translate in her writing of this book – it showed. Just one example: at the bit where she tells
the reader the months of the year in German, “May” was actually translated as “Können”, the
modal verb in the infinitive! Meanwhile, I was grateful that I was able to copy and paste non-
Roman script into Google Translate for the purpose of checking the veracity of what she was
saying about languages which use a non-Roman script (even though, like I said, I don’t
actually speak them!). I remember at one point she used the verb “learn” in the teaching
Arabic bit and I put it into Google Translate and then I added an exclamation mark at the end
of it in an attempt to get the Google Translate program to treat it as an imperative verb and
not an infinitive, just to see what effect it would have in the Arabic translation of it that it was
inclined to provide.

And now, some evaluation. I think this kind of “odd job” online work is popular among the
Indians in particular, or is that just me? Even so, both of these jobs pertained to creative
projects involving words – all I can say is that I agree that people often see things differently,
and some things are very open to creative interpretation. Isn’t it comforting to know that the
Internet puts people in touch with professional wordsmiths like never before, who you can

fully expect to provide you with a well-informed new perspective for the sake of credibility
of your own creative project involving words, however irregular it may be (to some)?