United Nations Academic Impact is fortunate to work with a group of volunteer translators who make an invaluable contribution to our outreach efforts to audiences around the world by advancing multilingualism through the translation of content into Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian and Spanish. Get to know our translators in their own words. Here we introduce Charlotte Ip, one of our volunteer translators for the UNAI website in Chinese.
My name is Charlotte Ip.
I grew up reading and hearing the name United Nations (UN). From UNESCO heritage sites that formed part of my Geography exam syllabus to the annually-held Model United Nations conference in my secondary school, these otherwise minute episodes gradually pique my curiosity about this all-encompassing institution. Yet I barely knew where to start looking. As a Translation student, how could my skill set possibly fit into the sphere?
I first learned about the United Nations Academic Impact (UNAI) during my junior year, from a joint internship program looking for volunteer translators from the Department of Translation at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. As an optional extension of the Computer-aided Translation (CAT) course we took, the initiative especially required participants to utilise CAT tools and work as a team to translate UNAI articles into Chinese. I immediately realized that this was the springboard I had been searching for. This is where my aspiration aligns with UNAI’s vision to share what was initially an area-bound sustainability effort with a larger audience—and not to mention, where I could glimpse into the professional translation world.
Writing has always been my passion but prior to UNAI, I never knew or believed my pen could ever help breathe new life into such meaningful and heart-warming projects made possible by avid educators and even students like me. To do full justice to their contributions has been a key motivator for me to uphold the quality of output, and I am particularly grateful for the feedback my supervisor provided for each article I submitted as part of or on behalf of the team.
UNAI saw me grow not only as a translator and a team player but also as a person and a leader. I am extremely fortunate to be selected twice for this internship and entrusted with the project manager post in the second. As the gatekeeper for the team, I soon realized that the greatest challenge is not to ensure accuracy, but to get past accuracy to achieve idiomatic writing, in other words, to think like a reader. It was being the leader that I began to truly evaluate myself as part of the many unseen readers behind the screen, part of what I have been doing this for. And from there, I began to see the “life” I could breathe into these seemingly static narratives.
I think what this internship experience taught me is that you can make a difference in all shapes and forms. I hope like the selfless stars featured in the articles, we can all find a way to leverage our strengths for the sustainability of the world.