Work with Stuart Taylor!

I have worked hard to establish a good reputation built on trust and, ultimately, quality work by ensuring that I am organised each day. Past experience has taught me not to bite off more than I can chew, but rather to accept a steady and manageable volume of work with a view to guaranteeing that I will meet that deadline and deliver a text that doesn’t read like a translation.

Continuous professional development is extremely important to me. -First and foremost I make sure that I take advantage of the specialised texts that I translate, adding terminology to my glossaries and termbases as often as possible.

-Secondly, I love taking training courses on websites such as EdX and Proz.com in order to deepen my knowledge on topics I already deal with and others that I want to tackle in the future. Sometimes this means taking a break from accepting assignments, but it’s worth it!

When communicating with clients, I ask myself four questions:

• Do I sound professional?
• Can you read the smile behind the text?
• Have I addressed each of the client’s points?
• Have I gone above and beyond?

Hopefully the answer to these questions is always a resounding “yes!” I strive to talk to clients professionally, writing in a way that they can almost tell that there is a smile behind the text. I am friendly and outgoing by nature, so I want this to come across even in emails.

I often itemise my emails to make sure that separate points are addressed clearly to facilitate communication and avoid unnecessary back and forth.

Finally, I want my clients to feel that I’ve gone that extra mile for them. In practice, this involves delivering translations that don’t read like translations, or even simple things like pointing out source-text errors.

As a language lover, I strongly value communication and positive interactions. With that in mind, I work best when my clients treat me like a human being rather than a translation machine. That means setting boundaries, providing decent remuneration for the highly skilled work I perform and affording me sufficient time to complete each task.

Most of my clients fully understand this and it shows in how they interact with me. This is highly motivating for me and, in return, I work hard to deliver quality work, bearing in mind that clients also have restrictions and requirements of their own that I have to consider.