Most editors we interview were already working with languages in some capacity before coming to Unbabel. Meanwhile, Elena’s story with Unbabel was a bit different: it started when she graduated from veterinary school.

Although she always loved animals, it was difficult to find vet work in the same town as where her family was settled. It was a Google search that brought her to Unbabel, and that ended up giving her the translation experience she needed to start finding other opportunities. Animals are still part of her life, though, as she has a dog named Selva and three cats.

At the start, she felt strange correcting machine translations because she felt they were “so bad that I had to delete everything and start over,” but over the years, she’s seen AI improve the quality of machine translation. But one of her words of advice to new editors is to always read the source text twice: one time to fix stuff, and the second time to correct their own mistakes.

She works on her English by reading, watching movies, and writing. She’s even been writing to a pen pal for 15 years! Her pen pal is from California but she has been to visit Elena in Spain. Elena also learned Portuguese through osmosis, and more reading and writing, although she admits that spoken Portuguese is still hard to understand. It’s hard for us too sometimes!

Although Elena says that her plans for next are “having no expectations,” she misses traveling and hopes that once her daughter is a bit older they’ll be able to make it to Costa Rica, or maybe Rio de Janeiro.

You can tell by talking to Elena that she’s a really positive person, and that’s why she refuses to put expectations in the future. It became even more obvious when she told us that her favorite Spanish saying is “Al mal tiempo, buena cara,” which literally means “To bad weather, show a good face.”