Internship: An Interesting Experience

The internship must be an unforgettable experience for every student in their university life. It is the same to me when I have gone through a 2 month internship of translation and interpretation in SportyMind VN, which is full of new and interesting things. I mean “new” and “interesting” because it was shown both in the array of the topic that I had to translate and the way to process the work.

I worked as a team member with three other classmates to produce the final translated version of a book from English to Vietnamese. In terms of the topic, it was about a rather new and strange subject in Vietnam – betting. We did not have any experience or background knowledge of this subject, therefore, at first, we really struggled to understand the basic concept of the translation tasks. Some terms could not even be found online, so we had to “invent” their Vietnamese names. It was quite interesting because I used to think that Google was a versatile search engine and it knew everything so finding the name of something was rather easy; however, this topic required us to understand the meaning and built our own glossary – something that we had never experienced before.

Moreover, working in a group efficiently to complete the task was another challenging issue needing the right method. In the beginning, we translated independently with no discussion and no agreement on terms but kept translating directly. As a result, when putting the texts together, our work was full of errors. Fortunately, we realized our mistakes and fixed them right away by reading through the text first to understand the main idea of the text, then unifying the terms together before translation. Finally, we edited the text together by reading it again to make sure the product was correct and understandable. Besides, thanks to the guidance of Mr. Tin, we could also clarify the difficult terms and learn how to present the translated version most reasonably.

What was more interesting in our internship was that it happened during the 2019-2020 Coronavirus pandemic. As a consequence, we just went to our office for the first month and for the rest of the course we had to work virtually from home. Online working was a bit inconvenient but it also had its good sides. Due to the flexibility of our time, we seemed to work more effectively and productively. Then another month passed, which officially ended my memorable internship period. I believe that with these exciting experiences, I will be more confident in the path of choosing my future career.  

Thuy Van