MY FATHER WAS A FARMER |

My father, a farmer, died in 2020. I was about to create The Engagement Ring Translation to assist quality-inclined tight margins handicapped fellow translation companies with their English-into-French and French-into-English translation projects.

Shortly after, I decided to take stock of my freelancing career. While I dug deep into my trajectory, I discovered that I had collaborated with 36 translation companies from 17 countries namely France, The UK, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Greece, Hungary, The USA, Canada, South Korea, Taiwan, India, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Kenya, Cameroon, and South Africa.

The greatest surprise was a letter from a UK-based translation company in which they explained that I had completed 1,210 projects for them in eight years with only nine logged quality issues. That constitutes a 99.25% success rate. It dawned on me that I owed that success to my late father.

My father was a self-demanding and hard-to-please farmer. He self-imposed the idea that a farm should not just be tidy but that it should also look elegant. While he neatly pruned coffee trees with his iconic red pruning shears, he would task us to arrange cut-off branches by size and in a special order. We were not allowed to cut resistant weeds but to uproot them, shake off soil from their roots and hang the weed upside down. He called “money-hungry” farmers who would not make extra efforts to properly dry and sort out coffee beans before selling them. “Every coffee bean you take to the marketplace tells the world a long story about you”, he would say, and would rather not sell than sell produce that would not amaze buyers or would tarnish his reputation. My father always worked as if he was preparing for an agriculture trade show.

Two things about my father shaped my mindset: extreme attention to detail and self-esteem. I owe my successful freelancing career to them. I made them the cornerstones of the corporate culture of The Engagement Ring Translation.

The Engagement Ring Translation

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The Engagement Ring Translation

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