By Clare Lee

There are perhaps no two families of languages which are more useful than the English and Chinese languages. Here Clare Lee tells about the rich and varied career options she was able to pursue with English, Cantonese and Putonghua.

Careers in retail merchandising, IT consulting and translation do not quite seem to be related at first glance. Yet I am going to tell my story on how language skills took me through my career journey.

My story began in the travel retail industry, or duty-free shops as they were called in the older days. I started in the merchandising department of a US company which was the No 1 duty free shop in the world. I had colleagues with different nationalities. 

Like most international companies, we mainly corresponded in English. We were sourcing products globally. I would be involved in product development, marketing material development, product training, writing up product information …

By and large, anything related to our assortment. Since we were serving international customers, we would need to provide multilingual information.  Though there would be dedicated colleagues to do the translations, I always did the product related English and Chinese translations by myself so as to provide more precise and accurate information. Sometimes, I would even do the simultaneous translations for our sales staff during product trainings conducted by our foreign vendors.

I first heard of the Institute of Linguists from a friend who asked me if we could do a translation course together before I started studying for my MBA. Since I have always been interested in languages and I had been doing English and Chinese translations for my job already, why not give it a try. We then took a course designed for the diploma in English and Chinese examinations.

After finishing the first few papers, I was recruited by a new travel retailer which was a new joint venture between the No 1 HK conglomerate and the No 1 travel retailer in Europe. 

Working for a start-up company has never been easy. Due to the limitation in resources, I needed to take on even more responsibilities. Doing more translations, dealing with product related legal issues were just part of them. However, the retail industry was then having a hard time during the economic downturn. I thought it was time to try something new.

I then joined the world’s No 1 enterprise resource planning system as a consultant. This company had a reputation of recruiting the industry experts to work with their technical consultants so as to better communicate with the clients. Yet all consultants would need to be certified before joining any projects. 

Unfortunately, there were no relevant courses to be held in Hong Kong or Singapore at that time. I did not know for how long I would need to wait. I then requested to attend the course in Shanghai. No one before me from Hong Kong had ever taken any courses in mainland China because the training would be conducted in Mandarin (Putonghua) while Cantonese was mainly used in Hong Kong. Normally, the consultants would go to Singapore instead.

They might think that I was out of my mind, and perhaps, I was! It was a real challenge for me. The training was being conducted in Mandarin (Putonghua). Though I could master Mandarin (Putonghua) quite well, I was not familiar with Chinese computer terminology.

I needed to figure out the meaning of both the English translated training materials and the Chinese computer terminology. My brain was working on several sets of translations at the same time. At times, I really wanted to go home, like a kid wanting to escape from the nursery on her first day. Thanks to the discussions and learning with the local students and tutor, I passed the examination.

Though my company and clients had been very supportive to me, I felt that the job involved too much technical work to my liking, so I decided to go back to the business world. I then continued my journey in the FMCG industry (Fast Moving Consumer Goods) followed by my participation in a big theme park project. 

Since it was again a start-up, the resources were quite limited at the beginning, and I needed to be very hands-on. From legal documents, theme park rules, system documents to store construction drawings, I needed to understand all these with minimal help. I also needed to communicate with the relevant parties locally and overseas. After the theme park, I worked for a luxury department store before deciding to work on my own projects and became a part-time freelance translator in recent years.

Thanks to my previous careers which required a lot of language skills and gave me much exposure to different aspects of the business world. The knowledge gained helped me to deal with translations for business correspondence, accounting documents and even simple legal documents.

People say one’s path is already laid. It all seems very natural and it made sense for me to transform from a business person to a translator after all.

Clare Lee MCIL CL MBA BSc (Econ) Hons is a seasoned retail professional with consulting background. She is a Member and Chartered Linguist of the Chartered Institute of Linguists. She moved from Hong Kong to the UK and is now a freelance translator working in English/Cantonese/Mandarin. She specialises in translating business correspondence. 

She enjoys travelling and loves photography and handcrafts.

Find Clare Lee here. 

Views expressed on CIOL Voices are those of the writer and may not represent those of the wider membership or CIOL.