Building Valuable ProfessionalRelationships in Translation

As a young interpreter working in a Portland Translation company, I learned that I had strengths like no other in developing quality relationships with other people. It was at this Houston Translation company where I learned that the most important skill needed by translators today is the ability to get along with diverse people including clients and interpreters and that is regardless of the type of project that a person is working on. Whether translating marketing communication literature for a local service company, a website for a Fortune 500 company or a textbook for a major publisher, there is a great deal of importance in building a lasting relationship with your clients and co-workers.

Many people were envious of my people skills but in many respects, I believe that I had them since I was born. Could I be blessed with a special power? Perhaps, I have a unique gift for building relationships that other do not have. Are these connection skills and abilities learned or genetic? If I can figure out how I do it then can I train this ability to other translation professionals? With these questions in my mind, I felt that I would develop a set of instructions. I knew from two decades of German to English Translation work that has taken me all over the world that attitude and body language are paramount to creating a strong visual impression. I discovered that by altering my voice and by using particular words that I could make people who I had never me like me. Another discovery that I have made is that all cultures have a set words and expressions that can create a reaction. That's when I decided to invest more time to analyzing this topic. Sometimes you encounter people who are more difficult to talk with than others people. I’ve also wondered why I find some people extremely interesting but other people who I know feel that these same people are not very interesting. Clearly, something must be happening on a level beyond our conscious awareness.

It was at this point in my quest that I came across the early work of Drs. Richard Bandler and John Grinder on Neuro-Linguistic Programming. Believe it or not, as a translation worker, I had already been performing many of the activities instinctively that these doctors were endorsing in their research. Among a fountain of new insights, they revealed that everyone has a "favorite sense." When you find that certain something, you can target that person's weakness. The purpose of my study was becoming more finely tuned. Having made these discoveries, my research was pulling me away from my Medical Translation career and forcing me to spend more time studying subliminal behavior. After I left my translation job, I acquired a license in Subliminal Thought control. My new studies led my research in a new direction that led to findings about how certain words and non-verbal cues can open doors in social situations. My findings were widely reported in medical journals throughout the world and took me to more than 40 different countries and led to 4 books that were published.