Meet your CM: Catarina
When I meet Catarina for our interview it’s the first day of autumn and a crisp sunny morning, one of those where after a first cup of tea or coffee in the morning, you’re really ready to get to work. It’s appropriate, then, that I’m speaking to Catarina, whose energy and drive is apparent from the moment we sit down. This interview, I think, is going to fly by.
As we always do, we start off with the basics, and I ask Catarina what languages she currently manages. “Well, they change all the time!” she laughs. “But if we’re sticking to the ones I currently have and I’m likely to keep, that’ll be the wonderful German, Korean and Spanish (LatAm) communities.” I ask Catarina how she’s found getting to know these communities. “Almost everyone I meet is unbelievably nice and helpful as well as excited and happy to be working at Unbabel. Not everyone is like this all the time, of course, and that’s the nature of the game.”
But this isn’t something that deters her; in fact, it’s another thing that drives her forward. “As a community manager, you are responsible for everything coming through your LPs, you begin to learn every community’s pace, what they need, how they work. Every day, some stuff might go wrong, some stuff might go right, but that’s kind of what’s exciting and amazing. And for me, that’s really important. I really thrive in these kinds of situations and finding solutions to the problems and seeing things evolve, that’s something I really enjoy.”
Catarina is one of our Community Managers with a lot of background in translation project management, having previously worked at a large European LSP. This means she’s had plenty of time working with translation and with translation communities, though the community approach at Unbabel has been markedly different to those in her previous project management roles. In fact, when I ask her what her mission is for her job, a somewhat vague question that many people would take a long time to answer, Catarina doesn’t even flinch: “I think you’d say it’s bridging the gap between what the company needs and what my communities need, mediating and trying to find a healthy balance with both sides getting what they want and need as far as possible.”
For the next bit of our chat, we move back in time, and Catarina tells me about how she started to become acquainted with other languages. “I grew up in a small town in Trás-os-Montes in the north of Portugal, and like many Portuguese people in the 90s and 00s I was obsessed with US culture. I immersed myself in TV shows, books, movies, everything that came from the States.” At this point, we laugh about this and the benefit of hindsight, and how strangely ubiquitous US culture was in this period — knowing every single character from Friends inside and out and being plugged into MTV.
Something that’s nice about Portugal is we always subtitle everything, so we don’t use dubbing like some other countries do. I feel like that goes a very long way in language learning, because you hear the source and then see the translation on the screen, and that’s something that really helped me in learning English.” I nod enthusiastically; Catarina’s right on the money here, I think. “Although I grew out of this later on, it was really the start of my journey with English,” she tells me. “In fact, I was so enthusiastic that I actually majored in English literature at university.” So, there we have it: how your community manager turned from an avid consumer of US popular culture right up to a literary aficionado.
Catarina’s been at Unbabel for a year and three months, a period of time she says has flown by, yet she also feels “part of the furniture”. It strikes me that in those 15 months, we’ve had one long period of merging two communities together, with another one on the horizon, and that’s before we even get into the advent of ChatGPT and the huge changes our communities have experienced in the last year. “We’re changing very rapidly, we’re coming out with a lot of new features, and a lot of things that our communities need and they’ve been asking for these for quite a long time, and now is the time where we’re really pushing and getting those out to them, and that’s one of the parts that’s really exciting for those people who’ve been with us since 2017, 2018 or longer — they’ve really seen the growth of Unbabel and of our platform… For me, I love to be part of the solution even if, from the outside, it might not feel like we’re there yet.”
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As with all of our articles in this series, we always ask the same two questions at the end:
“If you could recommend one book, film or song to our community, what would it be?”
Catarina’s choice: Whiplash (2014), dir. Damien Chazelle
“I love that movie, I think it’s really great. I don’t want to spoil it for those who haven’t seen it, but it’s about a young drummer who is trying to make it as one of the best in his conservatory. It’s a very intense movie; I feel it speaks to the core of human nature, our drive to be the best that we can in whatever field we’re passionate about.”
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“If you could say one thing to our community, what would it be?”
Thank you for sticking with us through all of the changes, your constant communication, and providing amazing feedback. It’s helping us to shape Unbabel in the future.
