Some background information

Hi, I am Janneke, freelance translator, copywriter, and transcriber. I am Dutch of origin, but have been living abroad for more than 20 years. The first 10 years I spent in Scotland and I currently live in Serbia. The other pages on my website tell you what I do now, and here you can read about how I got there.

Educational Background

My educational career starts in The Netherlands where I first studied journalism and then switched to studying English Language at the University of Groningen. I received my final degrees at Glasgow University and I am proud to call myself Master of Art and Master of Philosophy, both in English Language. Now, I consider myself bilingual and my English is both fluent as well as grammatically correct.

If you follow this link, you can access my Thesis: The scribal fingerprint: a graphetic analysis of MS Glasow University Library Hunter 83

Professional Life in Scotland

In my professional life I started my first real job in Scotland as a call centre agent and was able to progress all the way to a higher management position in the same company. I played a main role in setting up a new call centre in Belgrade and moving several teams from all over the world to Serbia. At the same time, I worked at the University of Glasgow as a translator English-Dutch and Dutch-English. I gained a lot of experience there, about how to keep true to the tone of the original text or about the different translation methods. I also worked as a language tutor for the University of Glasgow, teaching Dutch to mainly Scottish adult students, but also to students from Germany, England and Ireland.

Family Life and Career in Serbia

In 2014 I decided to take a break from management to raise a family, here in Serbia where I remained. Now I have a husband and five children. Eight years ago I got more involved in writing again and from that moment onward I have been working as an (SEO)copywriter, mainly writing content for a wide variety of websites. To make my dream a reality, I have set up my own company here in Serbia and have since then gained extensive knowledge of copywriting as well as SEO. My background in management together with my knowledge of English and my academic way of thinking has been a great foundation for writing quality content. I believe that this combination is unusual but extremely helpful in this line of work.

As my English is perfect and I love languages, I also decided to start offering translation services. Because of my experience as a copywriter I deliver quality and stylistically correct translations. I am not afraid to use my creativity when translating, so that the result is a well compiled text that is pleasant to read in the target language. I do not believe in AI and machine translation as nothing can make a proper translation as a well-skilled translator like me can. I have been working on and off as a translator for almost 20 years now, starting when I was still a student at The University of Glasgow.

A year after I launched my own company, I was put into contact with a medical market research agency and I have been working with them ever since. Now I have several clients who require medical translations, transcriptions, or contant analyses. With seven years of experience in this field, I am a specialised transcriber in the pharma industry. I also regularly transcribe more general conversations, both in English and in Dutch.

My Current State of Affairs

At the moment, I am running a succesful business and my services are required worldwide. I have a number of regular clients, among which you can find pharmaceutical research agencies, marketing agencies, and e-commerce companies. I am also a mother, eternal student, runner, guitarist and generally a lover of life. So much has happened during the first part of my career, I cannot wait to see what the second half will bring.

Would you like to contact me and discuss what I can help you with? Fill in the form on my contact page, or use any of the other ways to contact me so we can discuss this further.