Welcome to my webpage – presumably you’ve been looking for a specialist pharmaceutical and medical translator or editor from German into English and now you’ve found me you might like to know a little more about me and why I’m the right person for your project.
I was a scientist before I was a translator. Overall, I draw on more than 15 years of translation experience from German into English. Since my Masters by Research (MRes) in Organic Chemistry and my certification by the Institute of Translators (ITI) I have been working exclusively in my specialist field of pharmaceutical and medical device regulatory documentation as well as clinical trial records.
Against the background of my Master’s degree I also have a keen interest in cancer research and related fields of genetic engineering, DNA technology and novel recombinant antibody molecules.
Check out on my ‘About Me‘ section to find out what makes me uniquely qualified, and if you really want to know what makes me tick, continue to Translating and Neurodiversity.
My services comprise
- Translating,
- Proofreading,
- Audio Transcription,
- Machine-Translation Post-Editing
Machine translation?
Yes indeed, whilst views are divided, I’m with siding with the camp that time-saving technology is here to stay. You will, of course, still find translators who swear on an entirely manual process for their craft shunning even the CAT (computer-assisted technology) tools that have been commonplace in the industry for decades and that ensure quality and consistency of terminology. However, personally, I have always embraced technology right from the arrival of the first word processors in the 1990s and I like to stay informed of the benefits and disadvantages of any new tools for my work, true to the saying “Keep your friends close, keep your enemies closer”.
For most of my translation work, and because I work in a very specific niche in two languages where I have native fluency only I find that machine translations don’t really save me time compared to the much longer established CAT tools for translators even though the progress of AI has been impressive in the past couple of years.
So, if you are a private client who needs their confidential medical records translated, rest assured, they won’t go anywhere near a robot for translation.
However, post-editing of machine translations for agency clients is my bread-and-butter work. Why? That type of work is usually on documents that are already pre-formatted and I no longer need to manually retype messy PDF documents, and get to focus on the linguistic task alone.
So, whilst I don’t mind the occasional graphology challenge when it comes to deciphering handwritten doctor’s or engineering notes, I am happy to tackle the problems that come with correcting less than perfect machine translations.
I speak from several years of experience to be able to say with certainty that just as robots aren’t very good at deciphering handwritten text, they are not truly intelligent either and therefore can’t make sense of imperfect input such as engineering notes in master batch records that use a lot of short-hand language.