My name is Eñaut Urrestarazu Aizpurua. Born and raised in Belgium, I’m Belgian on my mother’s side and Spanish Basque on my father’s side. I graduated in 1997 from Mons-Hainaut University School of International Interpreters (in Belgium) as a Translator from Spanish, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian into French.
Though fully bilingual since I was a child, most of my studies were completed in Belgium, so I consider French to be my first language, therefore my target language.
I started off as a technical translator at Reinisch Spain, a German company headquartered in Vitoria that specialized in technical documents; back then it was the official and exclusive distributor of Trados® in the Iberian peninsula. In addition to translation, at Reinisch I was in charge of the technical assistance service, so I became the first Trados® accredited trainer in Spain, and I learned everything a translation professional would wish to learn; how to translate with and without CAT tools, revise and correct texts, create price quotes, use Windows, Mac, and Unix, do modeling with self-editing programs (DTP), manage Networks, and even repair computer equipment (hardware). In 2002, following five years of incalculable learning at Reinisch, the time was ripe to move in a different direction and build my own translation agency, Igela Translations.
Up until approximately 2010, over 95% of my workload comprised technical translation and correction assignments (automotive; agricultural and aeronautical equipment, etc.) In the realm of health sciences, I only translated texts related to medical products, such as surgical scanners or instruments, because I didn’t dare translate pure and sheer medicine. My clients increasingly entrusted me with more medical translations and corrections, and less technical documents, and it gradually dawned on me that I was insufficiently trained. I spent too much time searching the Internet to solve translation problems, yet also doubting whether the sources were dependable and, ultimately, whether my own work was reliable. Most of the content I found was translated from English, so how could I know if the translation was correct? The only reliable resources were prep books for the MIR exams in France (ECN, National Ranking Examinations for resident internal doctors.)
This feeling of frustration encouraged me to resume my studies.
In the absence of specialized higher education programs for medical translation into French I toyed with the idea of studying medicine. Yet my entrepreneurial duties didn’t leave much time or flexibility to pursue it, so I took a Master's course in English-Spanish Medical Translation at AulaSIC where I was fortunate to learn from the most established and accredited medical translators, as Maria Paz Gomez Polledo, Pablo Mugüerza or Gonzalo Claros Díaz.
The translation process taught during my undergraduate translation studies in Belgium was pretty unsatisfactory. Believe it or not, translation precision was not prioritized, and translation challenges such as polysemy, false friends or calques were not tackled in depth.
Everything I learned during those 15 months of the Master program at AulaSIC forced me to question and rethink my way of translating. This led to a short-lived existential crisis which I overcame only to come back stronger, more prepared, clear-headed, and passionate toward my profession.
Having pursued an English-Spanish Master course also allowed me to realize how very lucky medical language professionals were —and still are—to work with this language pair, because they have the essential Dictionary of Doubts and Difficulties of English Medical Translation by Fernando Navarro at their fingertips.