Meet Markus! Translator’s tales no. 1

4 Aug 2015

Our translators are our everything! So we decided to present some of them. If nothing else, this goes to show you we don’t work with machine translation! Meet Markus, our nomadic narrator of a translator, who, at the time of writing, has been translating for 12 years.

Markus is a native speaker of English and Swedish, a fluent speaker of German, proficient in Norwegian and Danish, and conversant in Greek. We work with him mainly on Swedish to English translation projects.


Fact sheet:

Main areas of translation work: Contracts, software localisation (mainly financial, but also governmental), marketing copy translation, HR communications, multilingual multinationals and many more!

Markus’ translation quirks: Markus works standing up the majority of the time and strongly endorses this as a way to promote health and reduce occupational pain and fatigue. Interestingly, he also dictates his translations and can frequently be heard saying unkind things to his computer when the dictation program mishears him! Yet he still manages to deliver work that requires very little proofreading or editing…

Capacity per day or week: Unlimited. Just kidding, though Marcus’ translation capacity is on the high end of what a translator can typically manage; 5,000 words is not unusual on a good day.

Hobbies: Markus likes to do sprint workouts, where sprinting is understood liberally to mean not only running but any high-intensity exercise performed in intervals. He also likes to ski and bike. Markus reads widely.

A fun fact about Markus: Being a freelance translator has facilitated a quasi-nomadic existence for him over the years. He can recall sweating over translations in such odd places as Lusaka, Zambia and Sana’a, Yemen. As a translator he’s lived in places he liked and places he grew to dislike.

Translation is essentially an art form. And Markus does not fall short here either, as he is an experienced novelist and short story writer as well. So that’s Markus, a valuable member of the Avison translation team, known for his reliability, accuracy, flow and creativity. Look out for more meetings with the team…

Do you want to work as a translator for us, then please click here and fill in the form. Note that we do require at least 2 years of experience, and more often than not, a translation qualification as well.