“Translator” was never my answer when asked what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wanted to teach high school English, but my mother worried teachers didn’t get paid enough, so she made me pick a more traditional career path, as they called it in Chile. I resented not being able to follow my dream. I was seventeen and I simply couldn’t imagine getting out of bed every morning for the rest of my life to do something I wasn’t passionate about. But, in the end I went with my second choice: Architecture.

The school I had the best chance to get into was in a coastal city about 2 hours away from home. It had a reputation for being a more selective school with a controversially alternative approach to architecture. This, together with its location perched atop a hill overlooking the glorious Pacific Ocean, made it a worthwhile challenge for me. My older brother, considered to be the talented “artist” of the family had unsuccessfully applied to this school years before, so it came as a bit of a shock when little ol’ me passed all three stages of the entry exam and was accepted.

But my love for drawing and math, and the excitement of living on my own weren’t enough to keep me engaged. Over the course of my year there I realized that I desperately missed having the time to read and write. Math ended up saving me in an unexpected way. After I flunked it twice, I was forced to leave the school and pick another career path.

I took the university admissions test again and then had mere weeks to figure out where I wanted to apply to next. I remember sitting by a sunny window at my family’s beach house, the ocean roaring outside, and browsing through a newspaper dedicated to the career offerings of Chilean universities, trying to see if any of them “spoke” to me. I finally happened across one program that I really liked, and more importantly, that I could sell to my mother. It was a two-year taste of letters, exploring the scientific, creative, and practical aspects of literary culture, followed by the decision of which to explore further toward an undergraduate degree in Linguistics and Literature or Pedagogical Studies. A third option, the convincer for my mother, was a test at the end of the two years to switch over to Journalism. SOLD!

My Plan A from the get-go was always Pedagogical Studies, but she didn’t need to know that yet. Most of the first two years was a fixed study plan combining credits in my language of choice (English), linguistics, and literature, with electives in my preferred path, like Theory, Sociology and Philosophy of Education. By the time I had to make my decision, she had realized it was my path and mine alone to choose.

In my third year, my English Language and Civilization professor approached me with a pretty technical translation assignment that he was working on and asked if I’d be interested in taking on some of it to make a little money. I was eager to prove my proficiency, but this first pre-Internet assignment turned out to be such an awful experience that my mother had to hide my car keys to stop me from running away from it. Between the lack of readily available terminological resources or word processing software, not to mention my complete inexperience in both translation and life, I swore off translation no matter how much money I was offered.

A few months later though, one of my mother’s friends, a chef, approached me with a stack of recipes cut out from magazines that she wanted to have translated from English into Spanish. This was quite a bit more within the scope of my knowledge, and with no deadline looming I actually had a lot of fun doing it. The more I translated, the easier it got and the more I liked it.

A couple of years after that, I followed a boy all the way to Canada. When the time came to find a job, I approached as many ESL schools I could find in the yellow pages. After all, teaching was what I had trained to do in school. Coincidentally, one of the schools I approached belonged to a man who ran a translation agency. The ESL school he was promoting was just an idea he was working on, but the translation agency was a reality. It seemed that even though I had not picked translation, it had picked me. I was so desperate for work that I hounded this poor man until he relented and handed me a stack of papers to translate. To this day, I think he just gave me this assignment to shut me up, and happily paid me to keep me out of his hair.

By now I had a computer at home, word processing software, and access to the Internet. These three tools radically changed my opinion of translation; it was far from torturous and I was actually very good at it. With time, I even became good at more technical translation. In fact, the more of a challenge an assignment was, the more interested I was. Translation taught me that I love to learn, and with that realization came the knowledge that aside from proficiency in two or more languages, a good translator needs to be a good and eager researcher, and an excellent writer and communicator.

I’ve been translating for twenty years now. Sometime around my 6^th or 7^th year translating for a living, my client base organically expanded to include requests in language pairs other than English-Spanish, and the volume of work I started to handle required more hands on deck. Thus, was born Amero Communications, a small translation agency that over the last 15 years has grown to offer 40+ language pairs and other language services like interpretation and multilingual transcription.

This blog aims to explore our three core services, as well as provide an insider’s perspective on some of the fun projects we have gotten to work on, like the Toronto International Film Festival.

I hope that our site provides all the information you need as you plan your translation or transcription project, or coordinate interpreters for your next event.

Patricia Beiger
Director