Home is where the heart is

Hey Jay! How are you doing?

In all honesty, I left the writing style of the first book of the series for what it is. I found I felt more comfortable staying close to the writing style of the author of the original, if that´s all right with you.
And I want you to know that your instructions made a world of difference. You said that you were not looking for a one-to-one, literal translation, remember, and that the final deliverable should feel natural to a native speaker — as if the book were written in Dutch in the first place 

Bearing that in mind I had no qualms over losing or adding words, or even reconstructing entire sentences in the process of proofreading and editing the first six chapters. Although I had stayed as close as possible to the English text while translating. At all times my two leading questions were, 1. what (sensation, message, sentiment, and so on) does the author want to convey, and 2. what does it make an easy read for the (educated) native speaker?

`Screenagers´ might regard some words I use as obsolete, or even archaic. Which they are not of course — they just do not belong to their everyday vernacular.
My fellow students at university used to admire my wide vocabulary. If your proofreader, however, feels that I´m overdoing it, please let me know …
Uh, does that make any sense at all? 

Furthermore it may be worth mentioning, that I changed the punctuation quite a bit, as a phrase like »“Hello, Jay. I´m Jaap,” he said.« would translate as »“Hallo, Jay”, zei hij. “Ik ben Jaap.”« You can imagine, I´m sure, that it´s quite an extra effort to make all these changes, especially as most chapters contain a lot of direct speech, but … hey, that´s life, innit. 

And, yes, you were absolutely right about sending me the first book of the series for context, because the second book often refers to the first one, as the storylines are tightly interwoven. Therefore, it turned out to be very helpful to have read that one first, last Friday. 

Anyway, I guess what I want to say is, that I´m enjoying the ride so far. I know that translating legal documents or editing scientific papers is so much more … uh — no offence! — lucrative. But, this is … so much more fun! 
I know that you´re going to say that it´ll probably wear off over time, especially with lesser authors, but right now I´m enjoying myself immensely. Thank you for the opportunity. I so much wanted to see what it would be like. It almost feels like … oh, I dunno … like coming home? 

I´d better stop, before I get all mushy.

Have you got any idea at all when I am going to hear from you that I´ve done an awesome job so far?
Don´t get me wrong, it´s not that I am in a hurry — my availability on Upwork has been set to zero for the next six weeks — but Andovar, a Singapore-based translation agency, all of a sudden seems to be. They contacted me this morning that they want me to sign a CSA and a NDA (which I have not even read yet) by Sunday.
Sunday is a bit awkward as a deadline, don´t you think. So, I suspect that they are in a bit of a hurry for some reason or other. Which would be no problem whatsoever of course, if you send me packing after evaluating my first six chapters 

Anyway, they tell me that my work has been evaluated “by our client’s test evaluators” and I ended up on top. To be quite honest, Jay, I had forgotten all about that particular test. It was sometime before you and I e-met on this platform. So they sure took their time evaluating things — or there may have been a lot of contenders, I don´t know.

By the way, if your proofreader stumbles across an error or typo in my first six chapters, you should probably consider giving him or her a raise. 

By the same token, if he or she tells you that my translation is no good, you may want to consider hiring another proofreader. 

Either way, I do hope to hear from you soon. Have a great one! 

All the best,
Jaap