Michaela Pschierer-Barnfather
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Where do you live/work?
In my home office in beautiful Chester, and sometimes at co-working spaces.
Are you mainly a translator or interpreter or both? What languages?
I used to do both, but now I’m mainly a translator working from English to German
What are your specialist fields?
Business, marketing, general law.
What’s the strangest/most interesting project you’ve ever worked on?
Interpreting for an older German lady at the airport police station in Liverpool on the night before Easter. She was suspected of trying to smuggle her diseased husband as a normal passenger on board a plane. It was bizarre. I never knew what the outcome was.
Tell us about a particularly proud moment in your translation career:
Receiving the certificate for the Diploma in Translation in the post and holding the print version of my translated novel “Der Infinity Pool” in my hands.
Tell us two reasons why you like being a translator/interpreter:
The challenge of hunting down the specific words and phrases that most accurately capture the meaning of the original while sounding beautiful and natural in the translation.
Continually learning about new concepts, new developments, new products, and of different ways of looking at and thinking about things.
What are your plans for professional development or a new field you’d like to work in?
Too many! I’d like to move more towards creative and literary translation; I’d like to become a more proficient proofreader; I recently discovered transcription and would like to learn the best techniques and methods; and finally I would like to get my Italian up to an appropriate level to be added as another source language.
Tell us something not many people know about you:
I’ve got a NCFE Level 1 certificate in woodwork, creating a garden bench and a shoe rack