Who are you? Please introduce yourself
Hello, I’m Caroline, and I’m a French-to-English translator living in Mayenne, in north-western France with my husband and teenage son. My two grown-up stepchildren live locally and I’m also lucky enough to have two very small step-grandchildren!
I grew up in Biggin Hill (on the Kent-London border). I spent all my holidays with my grandparents in Guernsey, which although English-speaking today, has a strong historical French influence that sparked my interest for the language. I studied International Management with French at the University of Bath, choosing the course mainly because it didn’t involve French literature! I spent my third year working as a PA in Paris, and fell in love with France. I’ve been here pretty much ever since.
I’m a member of both the SFT and the ITI, and I coordinate the ITI’s International Network.
Do you translate, interpret, or both? What are your areas of specialism?
I translate. I used to do some liaison interpreting locally, mainly for house purchases, but decided a few years ago to focus solely on translation. Having studied management at university and worked for various companies for 12 years before I became a translator, I focused on business translations from the beginning. Obviously though, it’s a vast area, and saying “I specialise in business” doesn’t give clients a very precise idea of what you do. I toyed with various more specific specialisations before settling on financial communications and investor relations. Over the last couple of years, that has naturally come to include a large amount of work in corporate social responsibility, which I find very interesting.
Why did you decide to get into translation or interpreting?
At school (back in the dark ages, long before the internet), I told my careers teacher I wanted to be an interpreter. “Impossible!” she said, because I was only doing one language A-Level. With no other sources of information at hand, I naively believed her and set my sights on international business instead. After a brief spell as a corporate graduate trainee in the UK, I spent a decade running children’s holiday centres in France for a well-known travel operator. My job involved a large amount of translation and interpreting, and I completed a translation course through the University of London in Paris. By this time, I had two young stepchildren and a tiny baby. The hours I was working simply weren’t compatible with family life, and the yearning to make a living turning French into English had never really gone away. The time had come to strike out on my own as a translator.
What’s your favourite type of project?
My favourite projects are corporate communications translations for regular clients. I love it when I know the client’s business so well that I can write with confidence and feel that I’m doing a really good job, because I’m familiar with the history of the business, their projects and the terminology and tone of voice they use.
I’m currently writing (rather than translating) a sustainability report for a regular client, interviewing various people across the company and writing articles about their initiatives. It’s absolutely fascinating, especially as I might be speaking to staff in Australia in the morning, Ethiopia at lunchtime and Argentina in the afternoon.
What do you do outside of translation or interpreting?
If I’m not at my desk, there’s a good chance you’ll find me at the swimming pool. I’m the secretary of our local swimming club, and also a member of the Masters section, swimming a couple of kilometres two or three times a week. My son swims competitively for the club, and also coaches the younger children. At the weekend, there’s often a meet to organise, and timekeeping to do. We joke that the car could find its own way to the pool!
