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

Many people thought I was being extremely negative when I started this discussion, that I assumed that most people wanted to get out at some point.

What I really wanted people to think about was when they still could get out of the career if they wanted to.

Thanks for your interest in this topic, you’ll be able to read more about it in the upcoming issue of the ELT World journal at http://www.journal.eltworld.net

David

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

Interesting stuff. In my humble opinion this really depends on where you are – I’m in Brazil and the difficulty in moving into translation here is that anybody who has a reasonable level of English thinks they can translate, and undercuts people who have better skills, such as native speakers. The problem is that many of the customers don’t know if they’re getting a good translation or not – some I have read are appalling. I think also you need to like writing and be as good a writer as possible – it isn’t enough just to translate, you need to add a style that sounds like it was written by a native writer…

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!