You know you're a translator when...

Estos 36 puntos los tomé de un grupo de facebook (al que por supuesto me uní).

Spoiler alert!! Translators Only


1- You get the same empty stare after answering the question "What do you do?" or "What do you study?"

2- People tell you "So... Translator... You just study a foreign language? You work as a teacher, right? What else do you do? How many languages do you speak?"

3- People ask you how to say something in a different language, because a translator is supposed to have learnt the whole dictionary by heart...
(Translator ≠ WALKING DICTIONARY)

4- You admit you suck at maths.

5- You know how to use Trados, Wordfast, etc.

6- Sleeping is not as important as deadlines.

7- You realise that you can't avoid learning new things all the time with each text you translate.

8- You learn to loathe gerunds and false friends.

9- You know Alicia Zorrilla.

10- You're aware of issues such as gender and political correctness, which no one around you seems to care about.

11- You frequently have nightmares in which you're chased by Saussure, Chomsky, Halliday or Pinker.

12- You find certain words, expressions or translations utterly amusing... Yes, you laugh at words.

13- You have fun translating proverbs or idioms literally, such as "putting was the goose".

14- You finally learn how to use proper punctuation.

15- You find yourself looking up a word in the dictionary and you know you've already looked it up a thousand times before in your life.

16- You have run out of insults because this peculiar word seems to be nowhere in the world, but in the text you need to translate.

17- You find out how much money you've spent in books, photocopies and dictionaries and you realize you could be a millionaire if you had saved up all that money.

18- You can remember making weird noises to yourself, just because you were practising your Lenis Voiced Dental Fricative.

19- You know that the same meaning is hidden in these two sentences: "It's rude to point" and "Deixis is rude".

20- You know that the Spanish words "interface" and "interfaz" are not synonyms.

21- You can hold a coherent conversation with a colleague about derivational morphology or passive and middle voice.

22- You can list all the differences between unergative and unaccusative verbs, and you know the difference between a creole and a pidgin.

23- You know the difference between PRO and traces, and ECM and subject/object control verbs.

24- You know the different countless types of Spanish polysemic "se".

25- Drawing trees is the worst thing that can ever happen to you, because it no longer means pencils, branches and leaves, but subject, tense phrase and wh- movement.

26- You no longer distinguish weekends from the other days of the week, since weekends are no longer equated to leisure time, relaxation, happiness and glory.

27- You know how useless the RAE dictionary is, but you learn to cope with it.

28- You've got so used to working on your own, that sometimes you think you have a phobia for crowds.

29- You've resorted so many times to all techniques for keeping you awake for hours, that you've become an expert on the cafeine content of ALL drinks.

30- It doesn't matter how hard you try to achieve the best translation, there's always going to be someone who will disagree and would suggest changing absolutely everything.

31- You must restrain yourself from slapping people on their faces when you hear them producing horrible ungrammatical sentences.

32- You find yourself surrounded by too many women and few men.

33- You're starting a band called "Colourless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously", and your hit song is "I'm a lonely NP".

34- You measure your daily life in translations... (e.g. "When I get this translation done, I'll have dinner")

35- Your alarms go off every time you read a restaurant menu.

36- A friend asks for the meaning of a word and you clear your throat and start giving a lecture on etymology.

37- You keep 12 web pages open at the same time while you're working.

38- It takes you at least 10 minutes to look up just one word in a dictionary, because you find at least 10 other interesting words before the one you need.

39- Context is your "modus operandi/vivendi".


Yo no paré de reirme. Si te quieres unir al grupo: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/group.php?gid=61087939586&ref=mf