Samuel Murray, Translator: English → Afrikaans, Afrikaans → English

Language practice experience

I have more than a decade of experience as a translator.

• 1993 - 1995 (full-time translation student)
• 1997 - 2000 (part-time freelance translator)
• 2000 - 2006 (full-time in-house translator)
• 2007 - 2010 (full-time freelance translator, South Africa)
• Since 2011 (full-time freelance translator, Netherlands)

1993 - 1995 (full-time translation student)

From February 1993 to November 1995, I studied full-time for a diploma in translation. The course included a 3-month practical session in the second year, and most of my experience during that time was from freelance translation work. The classes were both practical and theoretical, and included subjects relating to language dynamics, translation itself, cultural understanding, computer usage, business skills, and foreign languages. I was the top student in my class, and the only one to obtained cum laude.

1997 - 2000 (part-time freelance translator)

Between 1996 and 1997, I spent two years in the United Kingdom on a working holiday, during which I spent most of my time among English speaking people. From December 1997 to 2000, did some freelance translation work and worked for a short while as an in-house translator at a consumer research firm.

2000 - 2006 (full-time in-house translator)

From May 2000 to December 2006, I was a full-time in-house translator at the South African national daily newspaper, Beeld. I worked in the advertising department, where I had translated a very wide variety of text types and fields.

Every week this daily newspaper had special sections for which I had to translate targeted advertisements and editorial copy. These included: motoring news (automobiles), auctions (including jewellery, antiques, heavy machinery, light machinery, catering equipment, and property), court ordered auctions, legal notices, classified advertisements (so-called smalls), holidays and tourism, sports, food, entertainment, once-off features on just about anything under the sun, and audited financial statements.

During those years I had also done part-time freelance translation work for a whole range of clients. These included: horticulture, pharmaceutical texts and medical texts (including translation, back translation and reviewing), software localisation, web sites, user manuals, school textbooks (mostly in the subjects history and tourism), magazine articles (into both English and Afrikaans), correspondence, religious materials, etc.

2007 - 2010 (full-time freelance translator, South Africa)

After having gathered a number of regular clients, and winning a large contract for software localisation in December 2006, I decided to become a full-time freelance translator from January 2007. During the year 2008 I also worked for the company Translate.org.za as a part-time project manager for some of their paid and volunteer translation and language promotion projects.

In 2007, I did about 250 separate translation jobs. This included the translation of Windows Vista into Afrikaans, for which I was the chief translator. In 2008, I did about about 400 separate translation jobs. In 2009, I did about 550 separate translation jobs. In 2010, I did about 900 separate translation jobs. These included small jobs that took less than an hour to complete, but also large jobs that took several days to finish.

Since October 2010 (full-time freelance translator, Netherlands)

I emigrated to the Netherlands in around 2008, and officially started working as a freelance translator in the Netherlands in October 2010 (called a "ZZP'er" in Dutch).

I am registered at the Dutch chamber of commerce and I have an EU VAT number.

In the past ten years I've sent an average of 350 invoices per year, for an average of 1200 individual "jobs" per year (ranging from large to small to tiny).

* back to top *