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Studying German was a pragmatic choice in retrospect. At the time, I chose it because two years of studying French had already sealed my pathway in languages. A school visit to Berlin quickly stimulated a more profound interest in Germany, its language, its people and its history.

Towards the end of secondary education, I returned to Germany twice: a period spent working in a café in Aachen, and another visit to Berlin. In Aachen, I undertook a study on whether the Football World Cup, being held in Germany at the time, had re-kindled national pride.

In Berlin, on the other hand, I visited a range of monuments and buildings related to the First and Second World Wars and the Cold War, also exploring former East Germany, notably Dresden.

My studies in German provoked an interest in the country’s politics, and led me to carrying out a project that analysed the contemporary rise of right-wing politics in the less affluent state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.

At university I studied German history in great detail, from reunification in 1871 until the end of the Second World War in 1945.

What’s this got to do with translation? History shapes language, and the German language is no exception. A profound understanding of events that have moulded a language and produced vocabulary is a crucial tool in translation.

World Time Clock at Alexanderplatz, Berlin

Aachen Cathedral

Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, Berlin

Semperoper, Dresden

In 2008, I was awarded a scholarship by the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) to study German language and culture at Munich University for four weeks, from where I explored the beautiful region of Bavaria, venturing as far as Salzburg, Austria.

This proved an opportunity to appreciate the difference in the German spoken in Bavaria to that spoken in the north of Germany. My career has also afforded me with a lot of experience in translating from Swiss and Austrian German, containing a range of differences from Standard German.

What’s this got to do with translation? If your text is written in Austrian or Swiss German, you need someone who is familiar with the grammatical, vocabulary, syntactical and cultural differences of those varieties to make sure that every idea gets across in English and nothing is lost in translation.

German

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