Saturday 30 April 2011

internships, traineeships, stages, work placements


It's the time of year when completing students begin to think about translation placements. There's a work placements tag on this blog with some suggestions, and I thought it might be helpful to post a few more links, some of them to regularly recurring positions, some seen in passing on the web.

The usual caveats apply. Remember that internships should benefit you at least as much as the company. Check the conditions carefully. Find out about the company; check that you are going to get useful experience and supervision, not just tea-brewing and photocopying. Be a bit cautious about internships with no remuneration (though be warned that not all internships are paid). Be wary of internship advertisements which have linguistic errors/are written badly; these are unlikely to be serious companies. Steer clear of companies who ask for payment of any sort for internship schemes.

These pay a living allowance of about 1000 euro a month. There are also paid and unpaid translation traineeships in the European Parliament. These have quite specific requirements.

SDL advertise regularly for interns for their Sheffield office. The scheme is open to students whose first language is French, German, Italian, Dutch, European Spanish, Latin American Spanish, and European Portuguese. The FAQs are here. Applications for the next batch of placements in October will be accepted from early June to mid-July.

You could keep an eye on the Euractiv website, which sometimes has useful-looking internships: currently advertising an English to French translation internship (seems unpaid but with some expenses reimbursed).


Some more links that you might find worth following up, depending on your location/interests/language combinations:
This videogame localisation company in Berlin is looking for interns working from English into Czech, Polish, German, Italian and Spanish:
http://www.crellin.de/deutsch/jobs/internships.htm (German to English; includes translation test as part of the application)
http://www.englishpen.org/aboutenglishpen/vacancies/volunteeringandinternships/ (for students with an interest in literary translation)
http://www.internshipinlondon.com/translation/internship-in-translation/176 (currently open to speakers of French, Spanish, Italian, German and Dutch).

Please note that the information above is presented in good faith, and neither the University of Portsmouth nor the writer of this blog makes any claims or accepts any liability in regard to any of these links.

(A vague disclaimer is nobody's friend.)

Anyone considering volunteer translation as a way of gaining experience might also like to keep an eye on the volunteering tag.

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