The road that has brought Sylvia Mercedes Trelles to this stage in her career as a freelance translator or interpreter has been a long and winding one.
It was two decades ago that Puerto Rico-born Mercedes Trelles graduated with an industrial engineering degree in Atlanta and ventured to South Carolina to work with the textile manufacturer Milliken Co. But that only lasted three years.
«I wasn’t terribly happy with my job because I had to deal with machines all the time and I’m more interested in dealing with people,» the daughter of a retired pharmacist says. «Even though I love computers and technology, I still felt isolated.»
She then shifted gears, going even more high-tech with a job in the documentation department at credit-card processor TSYS, which would eventually lead her to the firm’s translation services department because of her fluid Spanish skills.
Her 18-year career there was interrupted only by a one-year stint as a Spanish teacher at Pacelli High School in 1998 before heading back to TSYS, where she would work until a wave of layoffs in 2010 put her and more than 200 other staffers out of a job.
«It was hard for me. After being there so long, I felt like, oh gosh, my world is coming to an end,» says Mercedes Trelles, who harbors no ill feelings for her former employer, a place she loved to work.
Following some soul searching and a few months as technical writer at Synovus, Mercedes Trelles, 44 and a single mom, earned her certification from the National Language Service Corps last fall. She is now setting up a translation service that she believes will be valuable to both corporate employers in Columbus, as well as some agencies at Fort Benning.
The Ledger-Enquirer sat down with Mercedes Trelles recently to discuss her journey to this point, what it has been like making a living from languages, and the life ahead of her. It has been edited for length and clarity.
They were starting a project with Mexico and they needed bilingual people. They were looking for training people. It helped that I had a background with numbers and I love numbers. I do calculus for fun. I’m sure it’s a disease, but that’s OK. I’m not dangerous. (laughs I could do Sudoku in my sleep.
I loved it. I learned the system. I can still balance (numbers in my sleep with different currencies. I wrote the technical documentation and information bulletins.
Barry Carswell, who I used to work with, he would tell me: You need to think of translations not as looking up a word and then telling me the same word in a different language. You need to extract the meaning of what you’re trying to say and figure out in your head how can you put it in a different language. And once you have that idea, that concept, then you put it down on paper. I learned a lot from him.
We had all of the subject matter experts from TSYS that knew each sub-system really well, and then we had people in Mexico that knew the (financial industry very well. So we had to be in the middle trying to figure out how to say what they’re trying to convey in a language that they understand. There were some long hours, but it was fascinating. I loved that job.
My dad has always given me the best advice. He always said: Find something you love and just do it. He saw how much I love translation. … That’s what gave me the idea that I need to start my own agency. I’m qualified to do this work because I’ve been doing it for so long. And I’m passionate about languages. I already know Portuguese, French, and I’m starting to learn Italian and I’m going to be taking German.
Knowing so much about the banking and credit-card processing industries, and with having such a big company like TSYS here, I think that I can capitalize on that.
I think learning to watch people and analyze their body language, their facial expressions. I think that’s like 90 percent of the deal. … And I’m fascinated by cultures and people. … I think for any human being that’s really the key. Just treat them like a person and listen to them and you’ll be fascinated about how much you can learn from them.
No. I think they are very overpriced. Somebody like me, I have a different way of learning. It’s so easy for me to approach people because I’m friendly.
They’re all about the same because they’re all romance languages. And they all come from Latin, so they’re pretty similar.
In the industry, it’s like 26 cents a word, for a written word. For an hour, the rates are through the roof. It can be very expensive.
Google Translate I thought was a threat. But it turns out that it’s not. We can try to translate the sentence, ‘The PIN (personal identification number is alphanumeric.’ For «the,» Google Translate will give you the article in Spanish, ‘el’ or ‘la,’ depending on what it is. Then we go to PIN and we have an acronym. Now the word for pin in Spanish can be translated as «alfiler,» which is the pin that you use for sewing. So if you translate using Google Translate you can end up with … ‘The sewing pin is alphanumeric.’ It makes no sense whatsover. So you always need to have a human edit whatever is translated.
Do an immersion program. Go to a country and immerse yourself in the culture and find some people to talk with. Just get together and talk about your day.
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