Junior Team

Join our Junior Team

Lack of experience is no longer an obstacle to getting a job if you are young and talented and see your future as a translator. Translation agencies generally expect applicants to have a certain level of experience. Luisa’s minimum requirement is 500 pages or 120 000 words. However, philology students who are still at university or have just graduated or young people who are otherwise skilled in languages do not have such experience, and as such their talents might go to waste. In order to prevent this, we introduced a unique solution to the European translation market by launching our Junior Programme in 2012. In short, this allows us to give promising newcomers a chance to gain translation experience.

About the Junior programme

The programme involves independent work with real-life translation orders. In addition to constant feedback, juniors are also paid for each job they do.

Junior translators work on easier materials and everyday texts: summaries, simple specialised texts (economy, banking, health care, technology, law, etc.), correspondence, articles, user manuals and other professional and educational texts. Applicants’ areas of expertise are highlighted by their sample translations.

You maintain your Junior status until you have translated 500 pages. This can take up to three years in the case of the most common language combinations. Juniors who receive very good feedback, participate in the training sessions organised by our senior editors and complete their higher education may then be offered a job under regular conditions that apply to post-juniors or fully fledged translators.

Application requirements

You are welcome to apply if you are at least a first-year university student; there are no other limits on age or field of study, speciality or interest. Applicants are not expected to have experience: the only admission requirement is a very good sample translation in one or more topics or language combinations of your choice. Only those candidates who produce sufficiently good sample translation are accepted into the programme.

What do we offer?

Selected candidates are given

the opportunity to work on real translation orders;
remuneration at a junior rate;
feedback and instructions from our experienced editors;
further training under the guidance of our senior translators and/or editors and help learning how to use CAT tools; and
an internship certificate they can present to their educational institution should they wish to (regardless of the number of pages they have translated).

Note – Certain language combinations are also open for applications out of competition:

English–Finnish, Finnish–English
Estonian–Finnish
Estonian–Swedish

If you’re interested in any of these language combinations, you can apply at any time!

How to apply?

Applications have been accepted annually since autumn 2012.

The round of applications is open:

1-10 March,
1-10 October.

In order to apply for the Junior Programme, e-mail cv@luisa.ee:
– application letter describing your language background and experience (your language combinations and directions, preferred translation topic(s), whether you have translated before, lived in a foreign country, are familiar with CAT tools, etc.); and a properly presented CV.

Test translation

Once we have received your CV and application letter, we will send you a test translation file that includes multiple text extracts on various topics for you to translate. The test translation’s length is about two pages or 600 words and you will have 2-3 working days to complete it. When you submit your translation, please add a comment to your e-mail on which topics in the test translation suited you best.

The name of the file should be in the following format: Name-Surname_language direction_….

Our senior editors will review your translation and provide feedback.

If all goes well, we will schedule a meeting, sign a contract and you’ll be ready to start your translation internship.

Welcome to our junior team!

Submit enquiry

We will put together a personalised quote for you based on the language combination, subject and volume to be translated and the results of our analysis of the text.