Chris White
Where do you live/work?
Neston, on the Wirral.
Are you mainly a translator or interpreter or both? What languages?
Just a translator. Czech and Russian.
What are your specialist fields?
Currently marketing/PR, tourism and food & drink/hospitality.
What’s the strangest/most interesting project you’ve ever worked on?
The translation I did as part of my master’s dissertation was from a Czech novel with three different first-person narrators. Trying not to smother their individuality beneath my own idiolect and my grasp of Czech was tough but a lot of fun.
Tell us about a particularly proud moment in your translation career:
Nothing yet! Graduating mid-pandemic meant even that didn’t feel like much of an event. I’m bound to do something worth shouting about someday, right?
Tell us two reasons why you like being a translator/interpreter:
Those eureka moments where you crack a tricky source phrase, and being paid to make groan-worthy puns.
What is the most interesting place where you have lived/visited?
Tomsk, Russia. Life in the city is extremely ordinary, but everything about the place is ever so slightly surreal. Shoutout to the old bloke standing outside a burger restaurant on my way to uni openly carrying a Kalashnikov, a sight no one else in the vicinity seemed at all surprised by.
What are your plans for professional development or a new field you’d like to work in?
I’d like to start working more in Law. I’ve done just a handful of legal translations and feel like in my languages there is a lot of work in it, but I feel uneasy listing it as a one of my fields when applying to agencies.
Tell us something not many people know about you:
By age 8 I could name every type of cloud, and the F1 world champion from any year since 1950. To date this knowledge is yet to be of material importance in my life.
