Our team of experienced, specialist translators is one of the main reasons that Fluid Translation can consistently deliver the highest quality translations to our customers. Some of our translators have been with us from the very beginning. In the second interview in our 20th anniversary series, we talk to Rosemary, who has been working as a translator since the 1990s and first joined Fluid Translation in 2009 as an authorised translator.
Can you tell us a bit about your background?
It was a long and winding road to becoming a translator. I was born and raised in California. I studied Fine Arts and then worked in the fashion industry in Los Angeles as a designer and production manager before eventually meeting and marrying my Swedish husband and moving to Sweden in 1994. At that point, I did not speak a word of Swedish.
How did you get into translation?
When my husband and I moved back to Sweden, the economy was in a bad state and jobs were very thin on the ground. My husband, Bo, recognised the value of our outstanding English skills and started cold-calling PR, ad and translation agencies. Our first customer, Ann-Sofie Flyrén, owner of A till Ö Konsult, liked the sound of him and decided to take a chance on him by giving him a small translation job. From that point on, Ann-Sofie became our customer for the next 20 years, until she retired. Meanwhile, I was teaching myself Swedish and, after a year of study, I took on my first translation project.
After about ten years, I had acquired enough skill and knowledge to pass the test to become an authorised translator. In the early days, I translated pretty much anything and everything. As the years passed, I increasingly concentrated on financial, legal and academic texts.
Do you have a favourite project that you have worked on?
Hmm, there have been a lot of interesting projects over the years. I was proud to translate a book by a very well-known Swedish political scientist that was published by Cambridge University Press. Then there was ‘Women and Cows’, a paper by Janken Myrdal about the importance of cows and dairies in the lives of women in medieval Sweden that was a joy to translate.
In the financial arena, I particularly enjoyed translating important documents for Fluid on behalf of the Swedish Government, an organisation which, of course, has very exacting standards. Translations of policy documents such as the National Convergence Programmes, which describe fiscal and monetary policy frameworks in relation to EU policies, were always an interesting challenge.
Do you enjoy working with Fluid Translation? Why is that?
Very much so. The staff are skilled and easy to deal with, the projects are well-organised and well-managed, and the rates of pay are fair.
I also enjoy the variety of clients that Fluid works with. As a translator, it important to me that a client understands how translation works and can trust and respect the expertise of the translator.
What has changed since you started working in the translation industry?
Gosh… working for agencies was enjoyable and profitable and, over the years, Bo and I have worked with several different companies. These days, the emphasis among many agencies has changed from quality and mutual respect to squeezing the last penny out of translators. As a result, I mainly work for direct clients now, as well as with a couple of exceptionally good agencies such as Fluid.