I prepared for one career and built another
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What motivated Benny to pursue a career in conference interpreting?
Welcome to the Language and Travel Hacking Podcast from Fluent in Three Months.
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Language and Travel Hacking Podcast. I'm your host, Benny Lewis, and today I want to talk about a little bit of a backstory of how I was preparing for one career and I ended up building up another one. So rewinding quite a lot of years, I was living in Perugia in Italy and working in a completely different city in Foligno. And the train and bike journey there and back took three hours every day. I'd have to wake up before six in the morning and sometimes work would keep me as late as eleven at night. So I was doing this despite the fact that the pay was abysmal, and the job was split half and half between translation training and teaching English. They were eager to have me because
I was a very experienced English teacher at the time and I took the job myself because I wanted the training and translation specifically to strengthen an application that I'd been building my life around for almost four years. For that time, my plan was essentially to work towards doing a master's in conference interpreting. And after I graduated as an engineer, as you guys know, I moved to Spain and I learned Spanish. And that got me fascinated with languages. And I figured that conference interpreting looked like a great way to combine my technical background with the languages that I was working so hard to learn over over those years.
How did the university’s rule change derail his original master’s plan?
It was a great combo of the two. And to do that, I would need some qualifications. I put the effort in and I I passed the French Delph exam and then I went on to the Spanish Dele. Which I did at the highest level available, the C two. And I even prepared for the Italian Celli. I didn't end up sitting it, but I did put the work in for preparation. And I wasn't doing these just for fun. Each one was a step towards ultimately my big application to sit that master's degree and the career that I thought would be following it. And I was planning all of this around going to La Laguna in Tenerife, which was the long-term plan of university there. But suddenly, very shortly before I was ready to submit the application, the admissions changed the rule that that specific year the course would only accept people who were interpreting into Spanish, which meant that native Spanish-speaking candidates
Were the only ones viable. In my case, it wouldn't be accepted because my plan was to be an interpreter, among other languages, from Spanish into English.
Why did Benny decide to turn his translation training into freelance work?
So I was completely disqualified and I was devastated because for four years this was the plan. Spent years improving my languages, gaining qualifications, arranging my work life around becoming a stronger applicant so that. That I would be more likely to get accepted. And I accepted that poor pay and difficult training and the three-hour commute and everything I built up towards had just kind of collapsed and I had no clear replacement. So when a destination to your plan disappears, it's very easy to look back on the whole road and say it was a big fat waste of time and that the work I'd done would vanish as. soon as that university changed its rules. But ultimately I still had the languages I'd learned, I still had the qualifications, and I had a certain level of professional training.
So I did have more options than before I started. We don't have to pretend that every part of a an ultimately failed plan was a waste of time. Some preparation, even if it's for a specific one goal, can help you in different ways. In my case, the translation training became the immediate thing that I fell back on. I tried online freelance translation to support myself and that ultimately began my life as a digital nomad. That was the first ever job that I could do online.
How did early online translation gigs launch Benny’s location‑independent lifestyle?
Keep in mind this is way back in 2006 when working online was very, very uncommon, but I could receive the documents to be translated via email, and that meant I could take it anywhere I wanted. And it that helped me become location independent and got me into truly fast travel because up until that point I had to find work as I landed in places.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What motivated Benny to pursue a career in conference interpreting?
0:11–1:49
2
How did the university’s rule change derail his original master’s plan?
1:49–2:59
3
Why did Benny decide to turn his translation training into freelance work?
2:59–4:23
4
How did early online translation gigs launch Benny’s location‑independent lifestyle?
4:23–5:55
5
What steps did Benny take to transform his freelance work into the Fluent in 3 Months business?
5:55–7:13
6
What practical advice does Benny give for turning a failed plan into new opportunities?
7:13–8:19