Summer Placement Diaries

My first-year summer internship took place in partnership with Sofia-based Sofita Translation agency. Having already interacted with the company as a client when I needed documents translating into Bulgarian to enrol at New Bulgarian University, and given that the placement coordinator for Sofita also happened to be one of my dissertation supervisors and had taught us at NBU, I found myself firmly in “team Sofita” when it came to choosing a translation agency to work with.

I have worked for translation agencies before during internships performed as part of my undergraduate degree, so this was nothing new to me, but it was a first time working for a translation company in whose main language of operation I can order a beer, count to ten, and pretty much nothing else. In the end, this didn’t pose any problems at all – instead of contributing to current translation projects, my placement coordinator/dissertation supervisor/all-round guru Dr Todor Lazarov was able to tailor the experience to the focus of my dissertation, and provided some great insights as well as lots of helpful material to guide me on my way. We even managed to incorporate part of next year’s syllabus (that will be taught at the University of Wolverhampton) and use Python programming codes to more efficiently carry out tasks relating to my dissertation.

Most of this year has been a question of simply ‘making the best of it’, and my placement at Sofita managed to do exactly that. Instead of my placement taking place face-to-face on the company premises as originally planned, I was able to seamlessly switch to a fully-online experience work from home. This may have been trickier had I been working on current translation projects, but the nature of my individual placement meant that this had no detrimental impact on the experience.

Overall, my placement has been a very positive experience: it was very flexible and able to take into account my individual expectations and travel situation, it allowed me to build a relationship with a prominent translation agency based in Bulgaria’s capital, and it has really helped me to progress with my dissertation. I can only speak highly of Sofita – both as a collaborator and as a client. Here’s hoping that this next academic year will see the international element of this programme getting back on track!

Post Written by Rea Bartlett