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It’s going to be a quick post today (or this evening as I am writing this). I was having my post-evaluation meeting with one employee from DTP and he mentioned something that I found to quite humorous and true.

How many of you, when talking to family and friends, have a hard time explaining what Argos does or what you do in your job? How many people that you talk to think you must translate if you work for a translation company? I don’t think I could count the number of times someone asked me what I do and I told them I run a translation company and they asked me, “so how many languages can you speak?” or “what do you translate into?”. I usually just tell people what they want to hear. Yes, I do translations, that’s what the manager of a translation company does.

I guess what I found a bit funny was when the employee mentioned it, I realized that this is probably a company-wide phenomenon. He has a hard time explaining what DTP is, I bet localization guys have a hard time explaining what they do. I think most people think that PMs translate in a translation company. I suspect many people have experiences like this.

Then I got to thinking about interviews that I’ve had over the years. How many times have candidates mentioned that they have always been interested in translating, or have tried to impress me with their translation experience, even when applying for a job as a PM, a sales person….

What does this all mean? Well, I guess the truth is that nobody knows what we really do, how complicated our business really is. It’s such a small little niche business really when you think about it, I guess it’s not surprising. I guess we have unique professions. What that means is it takes us longer than the average person to describe what we do and at the end of a long explanation there is still a good chance the person will say, “so you like sitting in front of your computer all day and looking at dictionaries?”

Should have become a doctor. Easier to explain.

I’d be interested in hearing if others have had similar experiences.