Shenoy Rana

I am Shenoy Rana and presently I am pursuing a Master’s degree in French (Translation and Interpretation) Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. I graduated from Jesus and Mary College, Delhi after completing a three-year B.A. programme in Elective English and French in 2014. I have successfully completed the B2 level offered by Alliance Francaise de Delhi.

 I joined The Heritage School, Rohini as a TGT French in 2015 and worked there till 2017. I taught French as a third language to students of grades V to IX studying the CBSE curriculum. My experience as a French teacher has helped me gain an understanding of the challenges that most Indian students face while learning a foreign language. I was also a part of the curriculum design team and tried to imbibe as many opportunities as possible for students to gain exposure to French language and culture.  I am a diligent professional who has been consistently praised as proactive by my colleagues and management. I have demonstrated creative thinking, language and writing abilities in every aspect of my teaching role at The Heritage School.

Career goals

The translation industry in India is booming. With rapid globalization, not only do multi-national companies need their documents translated into different languages, but also need translators when dealing with their counterparts in other countries. Technical literature, software codes, legal and marketing documents, books and even audio and visual recordings are being translated from German, Japanese, Spanish, Chinese, Dutch and French into English, Hindi and even regional Indian languages.

Hence, with the future of the translation industry looking rather bright, I feel that pursuing a career in this industry will be both lucrative and satisfying. I started studying French in the year 2014 and since then, I have developed a strong bond with the language despite it being a foreign language. As a teacher at The Heritage School, I experienced the challenges that young learners face when it comes to learning a foreign language like French. It is only during the first semester of my Master’s degree in French Translation and Interpretation at Jawaharlal Nehru University, that I was exposed to the huge ocean of opportunities that the translation industry offers. With the IT, pharma, engineering, medical and scientific industries booming, there is a lot of scope for translating, sub-titling, localizing and interpreting foreign language documents.

We are on the brink of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and artificial intelligence is set to take over most job sectors. I want to stay abreast of the latest developments in machine translation and other translation tools. I am interested in translating for the web and am actively looking at a career in translation for digital platforms. India is poised to become the largest web-driven population in a few years and it’s obvious that Indian businesses would want to reach out to a global market. The same goes for foreign businesses looking to invest in India and attain a degree of market penetration that can only be made possible by reaching out to people in their respective mother tongues. This makes it quite obvious that a translator will soon become indispensable.

For a translator, knowledge of one single domain never suffices, and therefore one has to be adept at handling a diverse set of domains. I am sure that the Modlingua internship will allow me to enhance my knowledge of online marketing and related topics, which will further empower me as a translator with a diverse set of skills and expertise.

Shenoy Rana is a Summer Intern 2018 at Modlingua