Who are you? Please introduce yourself
I’m Suzie Withers, I’m a French to English freelance translator, based in the UK, in Southampton, on the south coast.
Do you translate, interpret, or both? What are your areas of specialism?
I don’t do interpreting, it scares me. People have said to me that I’d be a really good interpreter, but it’s too scary, too on the spot, too pressured. I like to take my time and compose my thoughts and compose my writing. So that works better for me.
I guess I’m probably a specialist in IT and in marketing texts. There was a time that I specialised in online courses and I was doing them all the time – big, 40,000-word projects. And then the company decided that they didn’t want to use translators any more and moved on. But recently I was approached by a luxury brand, so suddenly I’m doing marketing for luxury brands. And I’m fine with that! So I’m not a really niche translator.
Why did you decide to get into translation or interpreting?
I spent a long time working in IT and not using what I had studied at university. I studied French literature, philosophy, I lived in France, I loved it. And then somehow I ended up working in IT and not using French at all. And for many years that bothered me.
And then a friend of mine did the DipTrans, just on a whim. He wasn’t a translator at all, he was working in IT like I was. And he did it, and he passed, and I thought “Hold on, why don’t I try this as well?” So it was a bit of an on a whim thing, a personal challenge to see if I could do it. I took the exam. The first time round I passed two out of three papers, and the second time round I passed the final paper. And I got the DipTrans and thought “Right, I can become a translator”. But I also thought I’d have to become freelance and didn’t think I could do that, so I kind of just forgot about it for about… thirteen years! Yes, I got my DipTrans in 2007, and I started working as a translator in 2020.
I’d always been employed and couldn’t imagine how I would be a freelancer. I thought I didn’t have the right personality, I wouldn’t be able to find clients. I dismissed the idea of being in-house because I thought I’d need more than one language combination. So I essentially built my own barriers. I never really tried to pursue it. And then a bit later I was still fed up with my job in IT, so I started joining translation Facebook groups and just lurking, observing what was going on, working out how it all works, how you charge for it, agencies.
And then in 2020 I’d come to the end of an IT contract that I was working on and I said “I’m going to do something different. Here’s a thing that I can do remotely, this is a job that has always been remote and so it should work”. I still procrastinated for ages, but then I got a mentor and the mentor forced me to contact agencies, and it just took off from there.
But I think my background has been really useful in my translation work. At first, I underestimated all of the prior experience I had. I just thought “Oh I’m just changing completely to a new job, I won’t have anything useful to bring, I don’t have a background in translation”. But I have a background in business and I’m working with businesses. I understand how businesses work, what their concerns are. So it’s definitely an asset I didn’t realise I had when I started out as a translator.
What’s your favourite type of project?
Well, I did used to enjoy translating online courses – online IT courses. Because I had the whole course and I was responsible for it from start to finish. So I could ensure that the whole thing had a logical flow. And I could almost test out the course, because I would learn by going through it. And when it came to the quizzes I could think “Do I know the answers, have I explained it clearly enough so that someone can answer this question?” So that was a really nice, satisfying type of project to do.
Also the project I’ve just completed with the luxury client, which is a magazine, I think it’s a half-yearly magazine, with a different theme for each edition. They commission external contributors, and the articles are quite literary, philosophical, quite poetic. Really something to get your teeth into. I was mostly the proofreader for this project, I’d love to take on the translation for future issues if they’ll have me. It was almost literary translation, but short pieces, and that really gave me an appetite to do more stuff like that. I love more creative, poetic work.
What do you do outside of translation or interpreting?
I sing a lot. I’m the lead singer with a band, a rock/pop covers band. I’ve also just started learning to play bass guitar. I’ve always wanted to learn… I’ve always been drawn to bass lines – a lot of the music I like has strong bass lines. I swim, I run, I walk, I enjoy nature and wildlife photography.
Suzie is a French to English translator specialising in IT, marketing and communications.
You can find her on LinkedIn here.
