I am a Japanese to English translator currently based in Zürich, Switzerland for reasons which can be summed up as “love”! I grew up in several European cities thanks to my father’s work, and ended up back in Paris between a BA and MA in philosophy. Being a student on summer holiday, I turned on the children’s TV shows I used to watch… and realised there were huge differences in style between them. On investigation, I found that while some were French, or French-Belgian and French-Canadian co-productions, others were Japanese dubbed into French. I loved the anime art style and threw myself into all things Japanese, which eventually led to meeting my other half on a short language course during my MA.
After a few years of working in consultancy and project management, learning Japanese on the side, I went to Japan for a year on the JET Programme to teach English in a rural high school. A few years of working and saving funded a year of full-time study at a Japanese school in central Japan, and on my return I went into localisation project management, working at SDL and Xerox Global Services. I wasn’t using my Japanese as much as I wanted to, so I left and became a freelance translator, working for two years with Nintendo of Europe and earning an MA in Advanced Japanese Studies from the University of Sheffield before moving to Zürich in 2009 and branching out into translating for business and IT to make use of the document writing expertise I’d gained in my former career.
A short fellowship with WIPO introduced me to the world of genetic engineering - I found a new passion for biology and genetics, and am currently studying for a BSc with the Open University (due 2016). I hope to specialise in translating for life sciences, biotechnology and personalised medicine, and am a member of the ITI medical/pharmaceutical network (MedNet) and JATPHARMA (the pharmaceutical special interest group of the Japan Association of Translators), as well as the ITI Japanese Network (J-Net) and the science, technical, engineering and patents network (STEP). I’m really looking forward to putting faces to some of the names from those groups, meeting up with everyone I already know and making some new friends!
By happy coincidence, the Genetics Society spring meeting is being held in Edinburgh the weekend before the ITI conference, so I can combine the two with a city break in the capital of Scotland with a certain someone.
You can find me at http://www.arlinelyons.com, Arline Lyons Translation on Facebook, and @arlinelyons on Twitter.
