N.N.

Translation is a skill I have developed alongside my other technical abilities. I spent two years in Brazil as a religious missionary and as I developed my technical capabilities, I also expanded my vocabulary in Portuguese, and translation is something I have enjoyed doing and so I continue to pursue it.

I can read and write well in English thanks to my nativity and have learnt a great deal about Portuguese thanks to my stay in Brazil. At this time I have already expanded my vocabulary and grammar skills since my return from Brazil. So, it's important that one keeps on constantly learning in order to become an expert in more than one language.

I am a member of the American Translators Association and they send me monthly newsletters in addition to a language-specific newsletter, wherein I get the latest information about the happenings in the world of Portuguese–English translation and interpretation. I have also helped with the training of two postdoc students, who came from Brazil, and which allowed me to converse with them in both English and Portuguese. I have also worked for other agencies as a freelance translator which has kept me updated with the recent happenings in this Industry.

My chief areas of specialization are in Chemical Engineering, Biochemistry, and Molecular Biology. I have also done translation in several other related areas, including Mechanical engineering, Electrical engineering, and Civil engineering. I have also done some work in Geology but my core areas of technical specialization are Chemical engineering, Biochemistry, Biophysics, and related fields.

The goal, of course, is to clearly communicate the author's intent in English and maintain as much of their style and tone as possible. I try to achieve this to the best of my abilities by reading and understanding the source text as thoroughly as possible. As I do that, I also make efforts to clarify and improve the style, if necessary; specifically, for scientific articles which are often wordy and convoluted.

I take a significantly longer time to translate documents which are outside of my area of expertise. So, I try to avoid accepting such assignments for that reason. Not only do they take longer but I know that my final translation would not be of the same quality as someone who is familiar with the field.

I have more experience in translating academic papers compared to non-academic. I would say there is probably more latitude in the non-academic works to clarify style or to simplify the style of the paper. Typically, in the academic papers, at least on the ones that I have worked on in the engineering and biochemistry fields, there is not as much unnecessary wording or wordage as there might be in a non-academic paper. There is more technical content that has to be maintained in an academic paper; however, in a non-academic paper, I would say the tone and writing style of the author are more important.

I was given an assignment to translate a quality control manual for a time service division who is responsible to take care of the Atomic Clock and the Brazilian legal time. This is an area that I wasn't familiar with and the document was also written in a very legal form of Portuguese which took a significant amount of time to translate. By taking it slowly and reading through the document carefully as well as by interacting with the reviewer who worked on the document along with me, we were able to produce a document that successfully met the client's expectations.

I use online search method, only to check for some individual technical terms on a case to case basis. Translation software does not work well to translate entire sentences and the final output is quite poor.