Table of Contents
I’m a technical translator with business and technical experience in information systems development, 10 years as a freelancer, and as an Excel teacher. I lived and worked in France for 18 years until 2018, and in the UK for 14 years in all.
Database and KPI manager
It was a great sense of achievement to develop and manage the purchasing database (for a major computer manufacturer) to integrate pricing, forecast, and production data from multiple sources.
12 buyers entered purchasing price data manually for use by procurement to pass supplier orders and by marketing to cost future products. Purchasing used it to measure supplier quality and identify areas for improvement.
My role was to collect and import the data, develop and maintain the import process, and produce the necessary data for KPIs. I collated product road maps for significant components and identified purchasing requirements for the corporate PeopleSoft implementation.
Year 2000 Business Analyst
I was responsible for analysing PC applications for Year 2000 compatibility in a large insurance company, to determine the importance of each, and whether to scrap, retain, or redevelop.
Development Project coordinator
I spent three months organising development projects in Access for another insurance company.
Supply Chain and ERP experience
Working with PC database applications has taught me the need to be organised and the importance of structured tools such as Odoo.
I understand the need for ‘proper’ communication between management and staff, to communicate schedules, plan development.
I learned about the need for rigour and organization in development work. It also developed my creativity, dealing with continually moving goalposts.
Functional Requirements Analyst
We use UML techniques for functional requirements’ analysis of operational contexts through use cases, class diagrams, and relational data structures. We model requirements with business actors, in data modelling, or in data processing.
An Experienced Independent
Later, I started to focus on organizing as the central theme, focusing on management tools such as Todoist, Trello, Notion, Evernote, and Obsidian.
As a freelancer, I need to stay focused on the essential everyday work and yet manage strategic development.
It is challenging to progress more than a handful of projects at any one time, and it is easier to have ideas than implement them. I focus on management methods such as Getting Things Done (GTD) and Plan Do Check Assess (PDCA).
Experience as a Video Technician
I started a small media company called mjlvideo, which became Media Memory, to transfer a wide range of analogue film formats (videotapes, audio tapes, Super 8) to DVD, CD, or USB keys. We duplicated all types of digital media: CDs, DVDs, SD cards, floppy disks, and Iomega ZIP discs.
I edited digital projects for events based on digitized film, colour and exposure correction, reduction of long films, or compiling photo slideshows. I now transcribe video into text for English translation and video subtitling.
The challenge was often to consider the capital investment in machinery based on customer feedback and my vision of the developing market. I began to offer translation services to increase turnover, and found subtitling and transcription at the overlap between video and translation.
Transcreation and media
I offer a range of translation-related services (technical translation, transcription, and subtitling). I am interested in artistic and subtitling projects that intersect with the audiovisual.
Likewise, I was involved in an exciting project for a provider of interactive, immersive multimedia services to a museum. A labour of love was a project to subtitle the masterclass for a well-known writer in France.
Multimedia, cultural, and artistic work provide opportunities to build on a full range of technical experience.
Relevance of this Experience to Translation
As a translator, I specialize in subjects in which I have some experience, and use many other skills I have learned. For instance, development teaches precision, down to the last character. Grammar, spell-checking, and phraseology need detailed attention. But most of all, they require just a little extra time, and an eye for detail.
This all helps in managing everyday priorities and in translation work. It has also provided some valuable insights into management.
My contact with purchasing, engineering, procurement, and marketing has helped me understand the challenges of supply chain management. I was a qualified CPIM after an eighteen-month supply chain training course, and saw first-hand an assembly plant rebuilt from the ground up.
My development experience in Access helped me develop a technical translation terms database to manage projects and provide searchable terms for future projects.
One customer sends me projects on document management, which falls into my information systems specialization. I understand the need for documentation and what it means to acquire and manage a document management system.
Producing detailed reporting for management provided vital insights into this process. Managing and producing end-of-year accounts has provided knowledge of accounting.
I manage several websites, and I have experience producing marketing text and applying the principles of SEO (with the help of tools such as Rankmath, Semrush, and Ahrefs).
As a business analyst, I document methods and understand the use of documentation in teams.
My video and technical experience are valuable when doing subtitling, video editing, and transcription work.
My eighteen years living in France help when trying to understand even a technical text!
And finally, words have become my work. I enjoy words and composing text. I have spoken French since the age of thirteen, and I came to work in languages despite a technical career.