George Bernard Shaw once said something along the lines of “He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches“. As a student I often chuckled at this thought as I sat in translation class wondering whether any of my lecturers had ever worked as translators and whether they really knew what translation was all about and I still chuckled several years later as a full-time professional translator. Now that I’m a lecturer, I’m not chuckling any more.

The view really isn't that good from up here.

The decision to go into academia was not one that I consciously made, it just kind of happened. Let’s just say that when you get a PhD you just tend to drift into university life because that’s just what people do. Why else would you devote three years to pursuing something that is essentially preparation for life as a researcher and lecturer? But having said that, it’s not a bad career choice once you get used to the idiosyncrasies of academia.  On the one hand, academic life is less fraught with the day-to-day financial worries of freelancing full-time and it means you can just take on those jobs that are interesting, not the mundane donkey-work jobs. There’s also the satisfaction and sense of reward from passing on your experiences and helping students realise their potential. But on the other hand, you do get the sense that you are missing out on the cut and thrust of full-time translating, that somehow you’re not really a translator, merely a dabbler or worse still, that having gone from industry into academia, you’re a sell-out.

Having said that, I do think that in order to be a decent lecturer you need to be an active translator (or at least have recent professional experience). If for no other reason, because translating professionally can give you a plentiful supply of texts (assuming of course your clients agree to their texts being used) and it keeps you up to date with what’s happening in industry. Too many lecturers that I know of either are not active translators or have never translated professionally. The latter is something that really annoys me – how can you teach translation properly if you have never earned a living from it? In various institutions, I have seen lecturers whose only experience of translating has been the odd poem or novel written by some obscure medieval nobody. I’m sorry but this type of hobby translation coupled with degree in whatever doesn’t give you the knowledge and expertise you need to train translators for industry. Maybe Shaw had a point after all.

But ranting aside, I can’t do just one job. I get bored and frustrated. I can’t just be a translator no more than I can just be a lecturer. I love the variety of combining the two and I like the fact that I can pass on my experiences to students and for the most part, they appreciate this. Sure I get the occasional weirdo who does a translation degree but who has no intention of ever working as a translator but by and large it’s nice working with students and watching them develop as translators. I also like the fact that by being a translator I am doing what I trained to do – something from which I still derive an enormous amount of pleasure and which exercises parts of my brain that teaching just doesn’t. Translating also gives you a strong work ethic which I don’t think is all that common among some academics for whom the basic unit of working time is the week and not the hour.

So ultimately, as a lecturer who takes the job seriously, I find myself caught between two stools. The professional translators who might think I’ve sold out or that by living in the Ivory Tower I have lost touch with the “real” world, and the academics who have seriously misguided notions of translation competence and who look down on professional translators and anyone who isn’t a “traditional” academic (i.e. someone who has spent their entire working lives in the comfort of academia, researching the obscure, the surreal and often the irrelevant and who has never had to translate 3000+ words a day).

But this raises some interesting questions. Should you be allowed to teach if you have never worked as a professional translator? Should all university appointments be contingent on the prospective lecturer having a minimum level of experience outside academia? Would you trust a mechanic to fix the brakes on your car if he only had theoretical knowledge and had never actually stripped an engine or gotten oil under his finger nails? Would you trust a surgeon who had only read books but never cut open a human body? So why would you trust a lecturer who had never actually done the job they are training you for?