What am I supposed to do if I am bad at the one thing I’m supposed to be good at?
I am a translator in a creative field. I started formally learning my second language since high school until grad school. I live in the country where my second language is spoken. I use it every day at work, with my partner, with my friends, and even on the internet. This puts me at ten years formal education and six years on-the-job experience.
I still make mistakes at work. One of my editors is frustrated with me constantly. Every week I think I’ve turned in a good translation only for it to be returned to me filled with criticism and mocking.
My grad school translations were riddled with grammatical and spelling errors along with mistranslations, and I was constantly pulled into my professor’s office to receive lectures about how I was falling behind my peers. Assignments that took me five hours to do took my classmates two. (Yes, we timed ourselves, so I know for sure.)
After graduating, I found a job somehow and developed a strict regimen of self editing, including checking my translations by text-to-voice and reading my work aloud to weed out the careless mistakes. I double check the glossaries. I double check legacy texts. Rarely do I make spelling or terminology errors. Later, I changed jobs because I was not growing anymore in my previous environment.
And yet.
At my current job, I am still not good enough. My phrases are unnatural. I have strange syntax. Too literal translations. Incorrect nuance. Mistranslations.
Today at the feedback meeting my editor said to me, exasperated, “I want you to read this and tell me if this is natural.” And she read it to me, and all I could do was cry with my camera off. I had tried to implement the feedback she had given me previously, and I had made the translation not only worse but grammatically wrong, and I hadn’t even seen it.
Every week I dread translating for fear of what she will say to me. She has said things such as:
“I’m going to be honest with you, this is bad.”
“Read this to me and tell me if it makes sense.”
“Do you want me to put this in the bad translation hall of fame?”
At what point is this ADHD and at what point is it a personal failure? How am I not seeing what is obviously clear to my editors, even after multiple rounds of self-revision?
Any advice is appreciated.