Dot, Modern Languages BA graduate

What made you choose your course?

I started learning German when I was 12 at school and then it kind of just became my favourite subject. So, I did it all the way to A-levels. And then when I was finishing school, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. One of my friends had been an au-pair the previous summer, and she said, “why don’t you go and do that?”.  

So, I spent a year living in Berlin working as an au-pair after I finished school. And I just thought, why don’t I apply to study it. But I didn’t want to just do German, so I thought “what’s another language I can learn that’s not really going to be difficult?”. I chose Dutch as it would probably be the easiest thing I could also learn, considering I already know English and German.

What did you enjoy most about your course and would you say this influenced your career path? 

My favourite part of the course was when I got to do translations. Which is what I then obviously went on to do after. I ‘ve always continued with whatever I enjoyed most. It was really beneficial that I got do some practical translation; there was one module in particular, that I really remember because we had a big group of us. Half the class were German speakers, the other half were English speakers, and then we would team up with a German speaker and then we would do English into German translations then German into English translations. That was really good.

Did you know what career or industry you wanted to move into?

When I graduated, translation was my favourite. So when I went on to do my masters in translation at the University of Manchester, I was thinking I want to be a translator. I realised that I needed a masters to be able to go into that.

What made you choose postgraduate study and how did you find applying for a role after your master’s degree? 

Most jobs I was looking into required a master’s degree. Coming from Nottingham it was a good University to have when applying for a masters. I did a part-time master’s degree; it was over two and a half years. 

I started freelance translating halfway through my master’s so when I graduated, I just went full-time, because it was already going well for me. I never looked into any in-house jobs or applied for any roles. I sort of just continued as a freelancer.

I started working with Wayfair, the furniture company, so they were my first proper freelance client, and they were giving me enough work that they were my only client for the rest of my master’s degree. So that worked out for me as I had finished my master’s but also had a year and a bit of experience. That really helped me to get more clients, and it built up from there. It was not easy to start with, but it did work out.

What do you enjoy most about your job now? 

I enjoy getting to choose what clients I work with, where I work, what I work on and who I work with. Sometimes I go to co-working places and work alongside other translators. Also, when I want to learn a new skill, I can just go do the course or learn it myself. I get to decide what I want my job to be.  

In the past year or so, I have gone into subtitling, so now I do audio-visual translation for movies and TV shows. I really enjoy doing it and I just love that I’ve made that my job. But then I also do a lot of other things, I have given talks at conferences and workshops for example, I’ve done an audio-visual translating workshop at Manchester University, and I have my own podcast as well featuring other translators.

Do you have any other future career ambitions? 

I generally tend to go with the flow and see what I’m enjoying in the moment. For example, I have got a spreadsheet where I input all the work that I do, how much time it took, how much money I made etc. And I’ve always had a column that ranks how enjoyable it was.

If you could go back, what changes would you have made in your approach to university/student life that would have made getting to this point in your career easier? 

I think maybe I would have maybe applied more effort. For example, when I was living in Germany and Belgium, which was part of my year abroad. I wish I’d have made more of an effort to actually speak the language a bit more. I did speak the language, but I was kind of shying away from it a lot of the time because it’s a scary thing to do. And it can be hard to make friends with people when you’re not a 100% fluent in the language. I feel like that would have helped me more.