Who are we?
When I ended my professional cycling career I was at a loss. What should I do now? Look for a job? Go back to school? Win the lottery? Then, by chance, I stumbled upon translating. I had done a few favors in the past, translating letters, commercial texts and private financial documents for friends, relatives and sponsors. Having lived in so many different countries definitely gave me an edge here. So I started to ask around, tried to contact other translators, agencies, companies to find out about rates, requirements, training. As it turned out it was relatively easy to start as a freelance contractor, even in France, and I decided to give it a try. This was in 1998. Of course it took time to find the first clients, get some experience and learn how to work on a computer. I had never been overly interested in computers, this was in the early days of computers becoming a common household item for many people. There was no widespread internet, work still had to be received and submitted on floppy discs and/or mailed/faxed in print. I can only imagine what it had to have been like for my predecessors, working a draft in pen and finalizing with a typewriter…
In the first couple of years I also had the ambition of working for the European Committee or European Community, either in Brussels or Luxemburg. One of their requirements is that you have to obtain a masters title in language studies. So I decided to finish my once aborted academic career in France, where I was living at the time. I entered the Nancy 2 faculty, where they offered a decent distant learning curriculum, and managed to get my ‘licence’ in English studies fairly quickly. I then entered the masters program, but never saw it through. Mainly because business was good and I was working a lot, effectively keeping me from hitting the library and books enough to succeed in this academic endeavor.
I owe my very first break to Serge Boucheval at the SFEB agency in Paris. He contacted me when I was already considering giving up, for in 7 months I had earned only 1500 French Francs (+/- 220 Euros)!! Working on the HSL project for the Bouygues/Koop Tjuchem JV was the perfect opportunity to make a decent living and gain experience at the same time. I must have been very pale at the time, hardly saw the light of day with 80 hour working weeks being the rule rather than the exception. Once I was able to show this project as a reference other clients followed, and many of them have become regulars I very much enjoy working with and for.
My main activity is to translate for agencies and a few direct clients. Over the past couple of years I have also been able to accept multi language projects where I manage a few trusted translators specialized in languages I do not master, sometimes even my own language pairs when I’m too busy and do not want to let a client down. This is very demanding and fulfilling. I am constantly extending my network to new language pairs. It would be very neat if I could do more of this in the future.
I no longer live in France but instead moved back to my native country, the Netherlands. Building a website was a logical development for my business. This website acts like a portal where prospective or current clients and sub-contractors can find out a little bit more about me. It will further allow you to post jobs, requests and receive automatic quotes. There is a list of fields I am familiar working in, and a list of language pairs that TRADUITOUT can handle for you. I have also posted my CV here.
