This April we at Bangula have another talented new addition to our team: our new language and translation intern, Lorraine Shabangu. Lorraine is training in the Bangula office, lending her South African language expertise to a variety of language, translation and editing briefs. Take a look through Lorraine’s eyes at the first two weeks of her experience with us.
The first two weeks of work can be likened to the first two weeks of anything new in your life. Both are equally daunting, yet exciting enough to anticipate what is yet to come. Though formal education attempts to equip you with tools to survive in “the real world”, this is seldom enough to help you handle some of the realities of the work space.
These two weeks are very critical; as this is the time where your sense of worth is foreground. This is also the time where you’re always going out of your way to do things right. When given a task, the inner voice that keeps shouting “you’re supposed to know this”, often creeps up and gets you so scared to ask what is expected of you that you run the risk of making a complete fool of yourself. A task such as searching for an interpreter on the internet can make one feel a bit displaced when confusing an interpreter with a translator. Although these practices are often used interchangeably, there are subtle differences that help to distinguish them. This is such that an interpreter typically uses speech and a translator works with written text.
Coupled with all the uncertainty is remembering all your colleagues’ names and the roles they play. The hope is that you’ll hear these names often enough to finally link them to their faces, but this is not without it’s moments of awkwardness. The great thing about these first two weeks, however, is that they give you enough room to find your place within the work space and to explore all the things you could potentially be good at. Above all else, don’t be too hard on yourself…it’s only the first two weeks.