INTERVIEW
Blue Book Trainee
– Its natural habitat and dietary habits Also: What it has learnt blued, mostly about itself by Zoltan Tajti
Jānis Laucenieks is from Latvia and was a fellow translator trainee during my traineeship tenure at the European Commission (EC) from October 2016 to February 2017. We were stationed in Luxembourg and had spent five months at the EC’s Directorate-General for Translation (DGT) – me in the Hungarian, him in the Latvian department. Jānis was kind enough to sit down with me to talk about what prompted him to apply for the traineeship, how he spent his Luxembourg months, and what he has learned from his traineeship experience. First things first: why did you apply for the traineeship? I had just completed my second Bachelor. A friend of mine had done an EC traineeship, and she loved the experience, so I thought I’d give a shot at applying. I was a fresh graduate of Musicology then but my first Bachelor’s was in International Communication, and I had had a few courses in interpreting and translation. Thus, I chose DGT – which meant that if I got accepted, I would move to Luxembourg, as most of DGT is stationed there. What was the experience like? I learned a lot about myself. Most importantly, I learned that I love working with people, and do not like sitting in front of a screen very much. I am very social, and I like it when my work is not fully individual.
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Jānis Laucenieks, provided by Jānis Laucenieks Also, I now have a firm grasp of how the EU works and what its institutional structure is. Because of that, I now also understand better how Latvia – my home country – fits into the framework of the EU. I have since found this knowledge very useful.
