Rebecca Nicholls is a French to English translator and a writer with a background in film, television and publishing.
Who are you? Please introduce yourself
I’m a translator (French to British English only) and writer, originally from the UK, but I spent ten years of my professional life working between Paris and London. Before moving into translation, I worked for twenty years on the international side of film and television marketing and distribution. My career started in Australia, and I travelled all over the world with my work, which gave me a lifelong interest in cross-cultural communication. I’m now building my freelance translation practice alongside a small number of long-standing clients. I’m a recent qualified member of ITI, and have been a qualified member of CIOL since 2022.
Do you translate, interpret, or both? What are your areas of specialism?
I am a translator and writer (in English), not an interpreter. I have a special interest in literary translation, while script translation and adaptation make up the majority of my work. Within that, my micro-specialism is fast-turnaround translations of current affairs content. I am a news junkie and worked in current affairs and documentaries for most of my television career. I enjoy subtitling, but it doesn’t make up a regular part of my work at the moment. I have started working with arts and culture content, and with marketing and communications, and would love to grow those specialisms. I also really enjoy certified translations, which make a nice change of pace from the content that I mostly work with.
Why did you decide to get into translation or interpreting?
I have always written fiction, but in 2020 I was suffering from writer’s block for the first time in my life. A colleague in Paris had been let down by a translator and asked for my help. Working on those texts, I found that the words which had been blocked were suddenly flowing, and that I could use my background – the fact that I knew exactly who the translation was aimed at, and could angle the pitch to work well for them in English – to create something that would give my colleague the perfect pitch for his clients. I remembered how much I had loved translation back at Durham when I was studying for my bachelor’s. It was a revelation, and I signed up to start preparing for the DipTrans the very next week.
What’s your favourite type of project?
I enjoy projects where I can combine my writing skills with my background in international television and publishing. It might be a creative project working directly with a book’s author and ensuring that their voice is preserved in the English version, or it might be a documentary where my understanding of the subject, the audience, and the wider market context really matters. I’d like to do more book translation alongside my audiovisual work. I would also like to do more projects where I can work collaboratively with other linguists, sharing ideas and tackling tricky choices together.
What do you do outside of translation or interpreting?
I write urban fantasy stories; my latest novel is Dragon Spawned, which you can find here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/stores/author/B08JQGSSF2/.
I live in London and love the theatre (not musicals), galleries (quiet ones), documentary film festivals and my writers’ group.
