Better

I have been busy in the past a few weeks. As a reward, things seem to get better, career wise.

I am so happy that my school added another class this semester! So now I have three classes a week. Total school hours rose from 6 hours/week to 9! Well, this is still not enough for me at all, but better than nothing. The new class is called medical interpretation. It is a very practical and useful class. I learned a lot of medical terms, such as glaucoma, otorhinolaryngology, arteriosclerosis, etc. These are all “big words”. If you don’t know, you just don’t know. On the other hand, I learned how to interpret some small words whose meanings are so simple but which could often give me a hard time to find their appropriate Chinese or English counterparts. For example, I got stuck with “refill” one day. I was thinking of “续配”, but it only sounded okay, not great. Then later my teacher said “加配”, it sounded so right! Another example is “living will”. Basically, it means “遗嘱” or “生前嘱托”. But I don’t think any patient would like to hear that. So my teacher said we may use “意愿书” instead. Again, you just know the latter is a much better interpretation.

Two people called me to ask me to do translation and interpretation for them. I asked how they found me, they said “internet”! They are not the translation or interpretation agencies that I had sent my resume to. One of them was a elder lady, originally from Taiwan, asking to translate an antique birth certificate, the other a middle-aged woman asking me to do an immigration interview for her. It must be Yelp! Now if you search “Chinese interpreter Los Angeles” on google, my add on Yelp may show up on your first or second page. It is an interesting feeling! I also set up google’s AdWords function, but I received an email this morning starting with “we are sorry to tell you that no one clicked on your ads yet”. It looks like that I need to do something there.

I also got a call from a biotechnology software company a few days ago. They said that I did a good job in their translation test and they want me to localize their software into simplified Chinese. I’m very excited. My first big project!

Lastly, I got an admission letter from the Master Program in Conference Interpreting at the prestigious Monterey Institute of International Studies a couple of days ago. This is THE school for interpretation training in the world! It is like the Caltech in the science and engineering academia, or the Rockefeller University in the biological world. It has produced many interpreters for the UN. I took their extensive admission test and submitted my application in mid March. I’m still thinking of going or not because of their high tuition. This situation reminded me of the time when I had an offer from a Harvard University lab to do my Master’s thesis but I didn’t have enough fund. Once again, dream or reality? We’ll see.