Meet your CM: Irina
We’re bringing back profiles to help you get to know the people behind our community. First up is Irina…
I had just one hesitation when scheduling my interview with Irina: that it was directly after a large lunch and it was rather a hot afternoon. I needn’t have worried — as she joins me from Timișoara she bursts onto my screen and any post-lunch dip feelings of tiredness evaporate instantly as we embark on a long and detailed conversation about writing, communities and urban photography.
Irina joined us from another internal role; she was a project manager within Unbabel before joining the community team. “My main motivation was that I wanted to work more closely with freelancers, so I changed to community as soon as I found the opportunity.” Well, we’re grateful she did, but it seems the community members she works with feel the same. When I ask Irina about the languages she manages, she’s so proud to tell me that she manages Italian, Danish, Romanian, Greek, Malay and Indonesian, among others.
“There are some bigger communities and some smaller ones, but I think I’ve finally got to know them all. I love working with them. Working in any kind of communication is tricky, because different cultures communicate differently. I took some time to understand how they might react to news or new features, and how they provide feedback, and now I’m very comfortable with my communities, and we’ve created a team culture where we trust each other.”
Perhaps part of her collaborative nature comes from what she did before working at Unbabel, I wonder. Irina’s quick to draw the comparison: “I studied sociology and I was a freelance writer for a long time. Ever since I was ten years old I started writing and had this vision that I wanted to be a writer, and as an adult I made a go of it, but in the beginning I started working on simple marketing copy, then onto professional content, some of it legal writing and one academic paper on the history of psychiatry! I never would have thought that I’d be writing anything like that!”
This is interesting, I think, because it mirrors the experience of so much of what our community does. Just a few short years ago, it would have been perfectly feasible that you could do a hundred tasks and all one hundred of them would be customer service from the same three or four customers. Now, our client base has diversified a great deal, and so much of what we translate may be something our community has never worked on before. I asked Irina how she found her self-belief in this process.
“Once you decide to know more about something, that’s when you really start growing.”
“I’m a big advocate for self-learning if it’s something you want to do. You can find courses for everything, but you need to find your motivation and curiosity. Once you decide to know more about something, that’s when you really start growing. I always looked at something that might help me in my life: it’s not just something I’m typing, it’s also information I might need in the future.” I’m struck by this attitude — I don’t mind saying myself that there are certain topics you couldn’t pay me to read up on, but for Irina it really feels like there are no limits.
“The thing is that with translation you’re still learning something new, even if you’re not creating the text. It’s a wonderful way to learn… Each new skill that we pick up today could be something critical tomorrow — the market changes so fast.”
The devil’s advocate here, I say, would be that Irina is talking about writing and creating from scratch, not about translation; the margin that one has for creativity is diminished. “The thing is that with translation you’re still learning something new, even if you’re not creating the text. It’s a wonderful way to learn. I remember I used to give texts to my little brother to translate from Georgian [Irina’s native language] into English, not because I couldn’t do it, but because I thought it would be a great way for him to learn new things and get his brain working in that way. Each new skill that we pick up today could be something critical tomorrow — the market changes so fast.”
That lovely story leads me to Irina’s linguistic journey. Irina’s a Georgian native speaker, but has spoken English for much of her life, along with Russian, as many children’s TV programmes were in Georgia were in Russian some years ago, Romanian, which she’s started learning since moving to Timișoara, and German, which she spoke as a child. “I end up with this word salad in my head… I don’t know how my brain works exactly. One thing, though, is that people don’t know just how funny I am in Georgian! I try to translate the jokes into English and they don’t quite make sense.”
So, outside of her passion for the written word, what makes Irina tick? “I’m also an amateur photographer, and I should be at three million views by the end of this month, mostly urban photography.” I certainly wasn’t expecting that answer — I knew Irina was a keen photographer, but not to that extent. “I’m fascinated by urban landscapes and the stories they tell; as an example, I will endlessly be fascinated by Tbilisi, because you can have a brand new glass building, then a ‘European-style’ damaged building, then a Soviet block. For me, these are related to our identities — even the Soviet building might have balconies where people show their personalities. For me, taking photos of laundry on a line would be more interesting than a photo of a fancy building, because it’s about showing a sign of life or some part of identity.” If you’d like to take a look at Irina’s photography, you can do so here.
So what’s next for Irina? “Well, I want to get back to writing in Georgian, and taking more photos. But in terms of our community, I want to keep up the momentum and hold more events. It doesn’t have to be about a specific client or a specific thing, we can just sit and chat about things they want to learn or just know more about. I want to create a cosy, open atmosphere where we can get to know each other better. As a freelancer, I know how important this human element is, and I’m excited to do more of this.”
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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?
“I’d choose The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell. It’s amazing for those of you who are interested in storytelling!”
If you could say one thing to our community, what would it be?
“Even as a freelancer, the job isn’t easy, and I know this — you’re always near your laptop and it can be very demanding. But I hope that they know that if they need me, they can reach out and just chat about anything. In a sentence: we’re not just a group of individuals, we are a community.”
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