Summer Placement Diaries
Karina's Summer Placement at Mitra Translations
For my placement I chose Mitra Translations Agency in Sofia, Bulgaria. The company was founded in 1989, in Shumen and now it has three offices located in Sofia, Varna and Shumen. Today Mitra Translations is one of the biggest MLP (Multi Language Provider) in Bulgaria. They offer a wide range of services and have clients all over the world. Language services are provided in 50+ language combinations. The company works with a wide array of industries including businesses, legal service providers, governments and municipalities, Healthcare, Manufacture, Education, IT & Software, Energy, Telecommunications, Financial and Banking institutions. They provide services and solutions for both small and medium-sized companies and for large corporations and public administration bodies.
My placement took place from June 29 till July 24, covering 160 hours in total (four hours onsite and four hours of online work each day). I recently finished the last week of my placement.
During the first week of the placement I learnt about Mitra, its history, team, structure, activities, etc. It helped me to get a general idea of how the work of a translation agency is organised. I was shown how Mitra determines the quality of machine translation output and the quality of post-editors work. One of the important aspects of my placement in Mitra Translations is that I got a chance to learn how to work with SDL Trados Studio 2019. It is the main CAT tool used in the agency, as it is not cloud based and allows keeping confidential documents only on the company’s computers.
As for the tasks that I get, I usually translate or post-edit specialised texts of various topics from English into Russian and from Russian into English. The texts are taken from different domains such as advertising, law, medicine, culture, photography, news, etc. As I cannot access SDL Trados Studio 2019 from home, for home assignments I use Memsource Cloud. I am also involved in pre-processing and post-processing of the documents and term extraction. Pre-processing may include editing and checking some specific data, for example, inserting formulas that were not recognised by OCR software. Sometimes I am given training translation exercises (translating a text and then comparing it with an existing translation).
The placement has been important for my dissertation, as I had some tasks related to my topic. In my dissertation I would like to focus on glossary management tools, InterpretBank in particular. I got a chance to use InterpretBank in Mitra Translations and learnt a lot about it. We also conducted a small experiment to evaluate the quality of term extraction by different tools (AntConc, Sketch Engine, SynchroTerm and InterpretBank), which was important for me and contributed to the agency’s work.
During the last days of my placement I worked with MemoQ and MateCat. I was also given new translation and machine translation post-editing tasks. I am sure that the professional experience that I gained during my placement will be helpful for my future career.
Post Written by Karina Arzumanyan
