Hi Philippa

This is very interesting! It struck me how the EFL teachers in this particular discussion are looking to transition away from TEFL after a certain (hotly discussed) period of time, whereas I’ve always got the impression that career transitions in translation tend to be more common the other way around i.e. workers looking to transition into freelance translation (in particular) from another job or career. Given that certain kinds of jobs seem to lend themselves more easily to portfolio working, it would be interesting to see whether they also tend to crop up at specific stages of a portfolio career, e.g. beginning/middle/end, transient vs stable life, more/less family-friendly, etc. Do you think some kinds of jobs are more likely to have a “shelf life” in a portfolio career, after which people tend to move away from them for whatever reasons? I guess it all comes down to transferring your skills, as you say, and deciding whether you want to continue to build on these and/or focus more on developing new ones… SUCH an interesting area!

Sarah

[...] over at her Blogging Translator blog has picked up on the theme of changing careers, noticing how it relates to translation, and [...]

Thanks everyone for your interest in this post; it’s certainly given me a lot of food for thought and I will be coming back to the issue in subsequent posts. Since it’s a such a broad topic, I imagine there are quite a few aspects to consider…

I’m particularly interested in whether ‘portfolio’ jobs are more difficult to sustain as a long-term career. For some it can be quite difficult to keep motivated in careers which don’t have a clear, established progression structure. However, for some people this may just be the motivation they need to work out a career path of their own.

Oh, and happy new year!