Translations (OK-Schalter.de)

• Full-time freelancer for 20+ years
• Since 2005, I’ve worked for agencies in 19 countries, says my database.
• A big Thank you to my clients from all these far-away places!
• I would like to mention that despite this international setting, of the many invoices I sent out, all have been paid except two, both by the same company. That’s really a testament to how much we can trust each other, even across borders.

Scope

• Turnaround time within hours or by the next day is definitely normal, can’t hurt to ask.
• Typical texts include user manuals, localization strings, documentation for consumer electronics and office appliances, business codes of ethics, and similar material. I still work with Trados, if your project requires it.
• I also offer proofreading, editing, and quality analysis of existing documents.
• Like for many translators today, my unit of accounting is word of source-text, which makes for intuitive pricing. Multiplying the word count of your document with my base rate in your currency gives you the fee I would charge.

Experience

• By now, I’ve completed a fair share of projects: The number of purchase orders fulfilled is certainly in the hundreds. So I was able to accumulate a time-tested workflow and good intuition about many aspects of my work.
• Some of my clients have worked with me regularly for almost two decades.
• Project managers have expressed appreciation for my consistently friendly, competent, and responsive service (their words, not mine).
• Of all the projects I’ve delivered, only a handful or less have been submitted after the agreed deadline, in concordance with the client.

Terms

• It will come down to email, rather than messengers, phone calls or conferencing tools. This is preferable for reliably traceing deliverables. It also helps to ensure that I have proper time to think and plan my commitments. Another reason I prefer email is that it’s nicely asynchronous: it helps a lot to keep things flowing. Rebuilding a focused context takes much longer than the phone call that broke it, generally.
• When I scan my inbox, it’s important that enquiries and job offers are addressed to me personally (“Hi Michael”). Introducing yourself and your project plausibly sets yourself apart from scammers and bots.
• If a message drowns in corporate speak, or if you appear to be contacting other (possibly dozens of) vendors simultaneously (first/lowest offer wins), I will do a background-check and permanently loose interest in that structure.

Background

• I started out doing freelance work for the Paris branch of a British automotive consultancy called Mitac. After a while, they recruited me as their in-house translator. Mitac went into a merger with Marketing Systems, Germany, when both where acquired by Polk International. Within a few years, we found ourselves in a very different corporate structure. I learned a lot from seeing how these things play out.
• In this new setting, I worked as a client administrator and downstream, on-site technical support specialist for Mitac’s electronic car auctions. I also received training in IBM Ascential Datastage, in the context of writeing database queries and related code for a key-account customer database. This was to comply with general customer requests, data extraction and interface building for our partners, and marketing analysis / mailing target selection.
• Earlier, I worked in France at Institut français de restauration des œuvres d’art (IFROA, a national art conservation school) as a library assistant, indexing and abstracting multilingual books and periodicals.
• I worked for a year or so as a CELTA-certified English teacher at ELI in Kyoto, while studying Japanese.

Education

• BSc (Honours) in Mathematics (2015).
• A few years abroad from Germany, both living and working in diverse cultural environments in France (Paris/Auxerre), the United States (Fairport, NY), England (London, Swaffham), Scotland (Edinburgh, Inverness), Japan (Kyoto) and Ireland (Dublin).
• College education in physics and technical translation after obtaining my German Abitur and completing 15 months of mandatory military service.
• Certificate of English Language Teaching to Adults (CELTA) from ITTC Bournemouth. (“A standard of English, both written and spoken, … equivalent to that of an educated speaker whose first language is English”).
• 京都国際外国語センター日本語科専修コースの課程卒業証書 (Graduation Diploma, Japanese Language Specialization Course, Kyoto International Foreign Language Center)
• Senior year of high school in Fairport, New York.

Testimonials

• A few here and here
• “Very thorough, as always […]”
• “Vielen Dank für die gute Zusammenarbeit. Wir werden uns gerne wieder an Sie wenden.”
• “Noch einmal vielen Dank für die gute Adaption des Textes, der Kunde war sehr zufrieden!”
• “Fast, reliable, accurate: working with you is a guarantee for high-quality translations. We hope to co-operate with you again!”
• “Thank you again for submitting your sample translation. It received an excellent review from my evaluator […]”
• “Herzlichen Dank für die schnelle Bearbeitung, die Übersetzung ist wirklich sehr gut geworden!”
• “Ich bedanke mich für die sehr angenehme Zusammenarbeit […]”
• “You are a Star!”
• “Merci pour tout ! On peut compter sur vous !”
• “Merci pour votre professionnalisme Michael.”
• “[…] danke für deine Arbeit. Wenn ich wieder Übersetzungen brauche, werde ich mich garantiert wieder bei dir melden.”
• “Thank you for the texts, it was our pleasure to work with you and we will be glad to cooperate in future as well.”
• “Thank you for your efficiency. Always appreciated.”
• “We had a look at your test and were very impressed with the quality of the translation.”
• “Haben Sie vielen Dank für Ihre frühzeitige Lieferung und die vorbildliche Strukturierung.”
• “I see you have worked for us before […] with great feedback!”
• “Thanks for that, on first impression the translation is absolutely perfect (As usual!)”
• “Ich möchte mich für die sehr professionelle Projektumsetzung bedanken.”
• “We are very happy with the work.”
• “[Our company] have worked with Michael for 7 years on a broad range of translation projects, and found his integrity, the quality of his work, and his service to be excellent. Michael can be relied upon to provide translation that is dependable and arrives on-time. I would recommend Michael without reservation.”
• “Vielen lieben Dank für Ihre Arbeit. Ich bin mal wieder sehr zufrieden.”
• “You’re one of my best resources with quick response and good quality translations!”

…and last, but not least: (makes me smile every time)

• “This may sound rather strange but I would like you to send in a second invoice […] for the same money again as I think your initial invoice was not for enough money in respect to your contribution.”

Clients

• My clients have been mostly translation agencies. As is customary, I have signed non-disclosure agreements for most of them, so I will not be able to provide translation samples of past work, nor can I list project details on my CV, which is kind of a bummer.
• For most of the translation agencies I work for, I am their “go-to” translator for translations or quality analysis in the EN-DE language pair. At least for their key accounts, my project managers often need to coordinate the same translation in around 20 other languages, interlaced with other unrelated tasks of similar scope, it’s really impressive. So my service is often “only” a reliable and friendly cog in their machine.
• Here is a list I pulled out of my end-customer database a few years ago, to give you an idea of what type of company commissions the jobs I do. The list is definitely not complete as I stopped using a client database at some point and wasn’t very strict about it, to begin with.