"I remember the moment of choosing the subjects and making my schedule: I felt like a child in a candy store, I didn’t know which ones to pick."
Núria Ortiz Güell
Younger Classicists may not have met anyone who has had a successful career after a Classics BA, or perhaps they have, but they would never have guessed! This series is here to show them the different paths that life may take and inspire them to thread their own.
This week, I spoke with Núria Ortiz Güell, who has built a successful career as a translator and localisation expert thanks to her initial Classics degree.
NB: I ask relevant questions about the degree and also its routes into employment. And I will be honest, transcribing the answers even when they are not necessarily what I want to hear, up to the very last question — would you do it again?
What aspects of your degree did you enjoy the most?
It’s difficult to mention only a few ones. I have a lot of good memories of that period. Looking only at the academic part, I liked almost all the subjects. I was more into the literary than linguistic side but I remember having excellent teachers who made me interested in the latter.
I loved Literature, especially poetry, and all those subjects that gave me a glimpse of everyday life, like vulgar Latin, Greek and Roman religion, epigraphy… I remember the moment of choosing the subjects and making my schedule: I felt like a child in a candy store, I didn’t know which ones to pick.
From the human perspective, I also think studying something that is so vocational gives you a totally different experience. I don’t think I have been in many places in my life where there are so many people just eager to learn. I had great teachers, I made wonderful friends, I really was in the place I wanted to be.
It was also a privilege to study in such an old and beautiful building.
Looking back, was your degree what you expected?
Yes, I can’t say there were any surprises or something I didn’t expect. I perfectly knew what I was getting into!
If you could go back and speak to your 18-year-old self, what advice would you give her about choosing a degree?
The same that my mum gave to me: "study what you like."
And I would add: "because you really don’t know which degree is going to have more career opportunities. Nobody knows that; things can change very quickly."
What was your first job after finishing your degree?
A really cool one. I worked at Disneyland Paris for almost two years.
And what other jobs have you had in your life, related or not to your degree?
I worked a few months in a Call center, I have been a teacher for eleven years, and now I am a translator.
In your professional career, what learnings from your Classics degree have been most useful?
It gave me an analytical mind and a very solid linguistic foundation.
Do you consider that anything you learnt was useless?
I do not think such a thing even exists. Any learning can be useful at a given moment, you just never know when or which. Haven’t you seen Slumdog Millionaire?
How does Classics inform your work as a translator and localisation expert?
It has been really useful, actually. Because most of what we do in Classics is translating. It was the analog era, so our main tool was a dictionary, a paper one. It was our biggest concern: which one to choose, how to afford it, was it worth it? Maybe stick to the old good Vox dictionary? Wow, that was only 20 years ago, but I feel like a dinosaur talking like that.
But that’s just the way it was. I remember the teacher coming to the class with 4 or 5 dictionaries and different translations of the same author and spending half an hour discussing if it was better to choose one word or another, considering all the possibilities and nuances. And that’s actually very similar to what we do in the Quality meetings with the team of translators. The only thing that changes is the source language and the antiquity of the texts, but leaving this aside, it’s just the same, and I love it.
Would you do it again?
Probably yes, because that choice is an important part of the person I am now.
Years after I finished my degree, I became very interested in Science, and sometimes I think it’s a pity I didn’t do something in that direction. But I could have done it then, after my degree. I mean, I could maybe regret not having studied something else between, let's say, my 22 and my first thirties. But I don’t regret choosing Classics as my initial degree. Also, I think most of my critical thinking, which is something very important to me and a big part of my personality, comes from that field, not from my latter interest in Science.
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