I entered the world of translation via Toyota manuals in 1987, when a manager at the newly installed assembly plant in Cumaná, Venezuela, asked me to translate one. I remember the first word that caught my eye: CKD, the acronym designating the boxes containing the parts that would make up the cars.I had no idea what a crankshaft was, and there was no Google then. Term search was a painstaking job, and I had to spend time at the plant, asking questions. The engineers there were always ready to oblige, giving me tours of the assembly line and taking me to meetings whenever a visiting inspector from Japan needed an interpreter. A year later, there were so many manuals needing translation that I hired someone to help me. He had just received his BA in English. Unlike me, he was conversant with car mechanics and knew his car parts, though he lacked the syntactic twist I had acquired through many years living in New York, a twist that 20 years later would help me get accreditation as a sworn translator. He remains with me still, although Toyota de Venezuela no longer requires many translations owing to economic woes. The last work we did, shortly before I moved to Spain 10 months ago, was the sworn translation of a European certification agency report on evaporative gas emissions.