RWS Linguist spotlight

I did some ad hoc translation when I was younger, but I’ve been translating full-time and as a career for 12 years.

I’ve always loved languages. It wasn’t highlighted as a career option in school and my studies were focused elsewhere, but despite the twists and turns on the path, I eventually came home to translation as my true love. 😊

I used to do academic editing (theses/dissertations) and one of my clients referred me to a local pharmaceutical company that needed patient leaflets (PIs) and patient information leaflets (PILs) translated from time to time. Eventually I was able to use this experience to the work I’m doing at RWS.

About 10 years.

I would say I work most with informed consent forms (ICFs) and PILs.

I find the endless possibilities for mistranslation a challenge – I really believe all these documents should be perfectly understandable. I relish the challenge of improving a little bit with each document: finding that a term we thought was suitable is actually not ideal and finding translations for new terms that are not in any of our dictionaries.

The source can be quite poorly written – sometimes we require client queries to work out what is meant, or supply missing verbs/pieces of information that are implied but not spelled out in the source text to improve the readability of the translation.

3 years.

I see more material being translated for low-resource languages in Africa, which is great, but is a challenge regarding terminology creation and quality control, so expectations in terms of time need to be adjusted.