Fluid Translation’s project management team work hard to ensure that all our customers have access to a range of highly-skilled and experienced translators and editors that are the best possible match for their projects. One of our main areas of work, and an area where it is absolutely key that our suppliers have in-depth knowledge about both terminology and style, is financial translation. One of our regular translators, Bianca, tells us about her work as a translator and the amount of effort that goes into becoming a specialist.
Tell us a little bit about your background
I grew up speaking English, Italian and Swahili and always felt that languages were a zone I enjoyed inhabiting. My first university degree was in German, French and Economics, during which most of my industrial year placement was spent in the translation department at Daimler-Benz in Stuttgart, Germany. They had me back twice, which was encouraging, and might have taken me on permanently when I graduated, but I had been advised that getting some wider experience of working life might be a good way to go, so I became a commodity trader instead of a translator as my first job after graduation, using my languages in a different way, liaising with clients and suppliers.
Seven years later, that job was followed by something different again, an admin/managerial role for a professional institute, the Chartered Institute of Taxation, where my daily fare was to soak up technical representations to HM Revenue & Customs. During that time, I discovered Swedish – my first visit to Sweden and hearing people speak the language had me thinking that learning it had to be my next goal in life, so I duly started with various courses and getting as much exposure to the language as possible.
Having worked at the CIOT for 20 years, I decided to go back to university to do a Master’s degree in Audio Visual Translation. My dissertation project was a translation of a Swedish comic book. I had set myself up as a freelance translator, working mainly from Swedish and German, and dedicated myself to that full-time once I had completed my Master’s.
What do you like most about working as a translator?
Most of what I translate or proofread is in the realm of business documents, reports and web content. These are the areas that I find most interesting. They also seem best suited to how I tend to think and to what I find stimulating in terms of finding ways to express things naturally in English. Other areas I focus on include marketing, PR and advertising, tourism, travel and lifestyle, news, politics and current affairs.
What was the transition to working with financial translation like?
Working with Fluid Translation has given me the opportunity to broaden and deepen my experience of working with financial translations. It is an area where they have a strong team of translators, and I find it a pleasure to work with all of them. Fluid’s professional approach to terminology support in order to ensure consistency and accuracy is second to none.
The main difference between financial projects and other translation work is that financial reports are mostly done with extremely tight deadlines – this makes them both challenging but also very satisfying.