English-Dutch translation and proofreading

Dutch is a horribly complicated language. If one reads the daily paper or a magazine, one simply cannot help to notice that even professional journalists, as well as their editors, often fail to avoid its mantraps and pitfalls, e.g. keep their ‘d’s, ’t’s, and ‘dt’s straight. The issue is: no spelling checker in the world is equipped to detect the latter problem.
The problem that you may want to avoid however, is that your Dutch target group does not buy your book, does not finish reading your article, or does not take your web content into serious consideration, if it contains basic misspellings.
If that is the least of your worries, by all means hire any translator. If not, please, hire only the best – for instance yours truly, who scored FIRST PLACE (of around 6000 test takers) on the Upwork English to Dutch Translation Skills test, needing half of the time allowed, and who passed some tests as well that Upwork explicitly intended for English native speakers only (see below).

Some years ago Arthur Godfrey, a teacher from Scarborough, voiced his awe by saying: ‘Your spoken and written command of English, Jaap, is better than that of most British teachers!’ His praise reminded me of the words of my English teacher at graduation: ‘Your final exam results, Jaap… my god, they exceeded the average level of my colleague English teachers nationwide!’ My (very) British family tells me that I should be tutoring… in England.
I suppose that my (virtually innate) multilingualism offered me an extensive reference frame which enabled me to get a hold of the base of the English tongue.

People close to me, if asked, might tell you, that one of the most difficult things I find to do, is toot my own horn. However, according to Upwork I should do exactly that as long as I am being truthful.

After high school (English, Dutch, French, German, Latin, Greek) I went to university to read Dutch Language and Culture (compare my Education below). I did not finish it though; life decided otherwise (see my employment history).

‘If you want to have a problem solved, you need to get Jaap involved!’ used to be the buzz at the top executive level of the companies that I worked for. And problem solving was my cup of tea – crisis management, interim management, trail-blazing management etc.
However, I feel now the time has arrived, for me to have a go at what I’m really good at… and enjoy.

Supported source languages: English, Frisian, Portuguese, French, German, Brazilian
(I mention the latter explicitly, because sometimes people do not realise that the nearly 250 million inhabitants of Brazil speak Portuguese; and since the Reforma Autográfica, which came into force on 1 January 2009, there are no differences in spelling anymore.)

Dit vind je misschien ook leuk...

1 reactie

  1. Jaap Slager schreef:

    I just finished a test on the Upwork site, where I enlisted as a freelancer a few days ago. It was an English to Dutch translation text and my score was 100%. As a matter of fact I am #1 so far, out of 5917 test takers. Feels good.