Fideua

Hey, I'm one of your ACI colleagues from another booth.

Which languages do you find the hardest? I currently work from French, Spanish and English, and out of those I find French to be the hardest because their way of thinking suits me less and I sometimes find it hard to distinguish words, to hear everything correctly. I have considered adding Portuguese for a while (am at a C1 level now), but I often find it almost impossible to understand in spoken form, did you experience the same problem? And if so: does it ever get better? :)

And maybe the opposite question can be fun too: Do you have a clear favorite among your working languages, and why?

Do you still get to do a lot of traveling? I've heard amazing stories from older colleagues of all the interesting places they got to work in, but from what I've gathered, our booth rarely gets to travel outside the seats of the EP anymore.

This is exactly how it is. First time I've seen it explained so clearly and briefly.

Just a small remark that might help you: the demand for interpreters isn't very high right now in most booths, so it might be very difficult to start in that area, but there does seem to be a relatively steady demand for translators/lawyer-linguists, so if you're just interested in languages and the EU, that could be a career choice to consider.

And general EU staff, of course, but they tend to require a knowledge of more than one major EU language as well. You can find a lot of info on recent job openings and requirements on the EPSO website, just to get a feel of what it would take.

Thanks for the tips! I love comedy, so I'll definitely check those out. I'm already quite fluent and I am able to have complicated conversations in Portuguese, translation is no problem either, it's just that it's so hard to understand because of the pronunciation, and microphones tend to make that worse. I also haven't had that much work lately, so I'm having to do a lot of translation on the side and haven't had much time to practice, maybe I'll pick it up again if work picks up again :)

I just started on German now, because I've always thought it silly that I couldn't speak any German and it's a good market for translation, and I'm absolutely loving it. But from what I've heard, it is very hard to interpret just because of the structure of the language. But at least it's generally easy to distinguish the words :)