Professional translation into Dutch:

Allow me to introduce myself: my name is Stefanie and I’ve been a Dutch professional translator for BigTranslation for several years now. I was born in Belgium and am currently living in the Netherlands. During my academic career, where I achieved a BA in Language and Literature, MA in Business Communication and MA in Journalism, one thing was always on my mind: I wanted a career as a professional translator, and one way or another I was going to achieve it. And I did!

A passion for translation

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been passionate about languages and professional translation. As a kid, I was always looking for spelling mistakes in newspapers and magazines. I would read the subtitles on television to see how translation and subtitling worked. I would watch kids’ television in French, English and Spanish without subtitles, just to develop my language skills. Because that’s what it is: language is a passion, professional translation is a passion. Trying to find the right words, putting them in the right place, conveying connotations and meanings that are created by putting specific words together and helping someone else understand something they never could before. Without professional translation and translators, we might have never heard of some faraway countries, we would never have understood the lyrics to our favourite songs and we wouldn’t be able to follow a movie in another language.

Translation as transferral

To translate is more than just replacing one word after another with words of a different language. To translate is to replace one language with another, transferring the meaning of the text, but also conveying the words between the lines, all the nuances and suggestions. It’s like the famous English writer Anthony Burgess once said: “Translation is not a matter of words only: it is a matter of making intelligible a whole culture.”