I am a 30 year old lady and have worked in the advertising sector for many years. I recently got a big contract with a German magazine, I was to provide all of the wording and art work for their magazine. I was more than happy to do this, I faced just one problem, I didn’t speak a word of German, so writing German was going to cause me a real problem. From past experience, I knew that computer packages which claimed that they could translate any text from one language to another were unreliable to say the least. My colleague had bought one to translate Spanish into English, unfortunately at the end of the programme the text on the page made no sense at all and we ended up paying for a translator to re-do the whole thing.
I decided that I had to approach a translation company who were experienced in translation. I searched the web and found a translation agency (Übersetzungsbüro) that had a wealth of experience working in different market sectors. The added advantage of this company is that the owner was fluent in speaking the English language, so I could discuss with him exactly what I wanted to achieve with the text that would go into the magazine.
I started to do the advertising for the German Magazine company, I used the German Translation company to convert all of my English text and the feed back I was getting was really good. I hoped that this would lead on to bigger contracts in the future. I was right within months of doing work for the German magazine I found that other orders for advertising were coming in thick and fast, from other companies within the same sector, including a German national newspaper.
I decided that I would advertise the fact that I had broken into the German advertising market, as a British National this was seen as a big achievement. I worked with a lot of German people now, but was ignorant to the language, and felt that if I was to really succeed within this country I would have to learn the language.
I went to college to study German, and also borrowed books and language tapes from the library that I listened to whilst driving the car to and from work. Within six months I knew the basics, and could answer simple questions, but knew that I would have to move to Germany for a year to really get a grip on the language.
So that is exactly what I did, I rented my house out and moved to the heart of Hamburg to work alongside my German colleagues. They all spoke to me in German for the entire 12 months, by the time I left I had gained the respect of my colleagues plus the skill of being able to hold a conversation in German.
When I got back on home turf, although I still needed my English work to be translated into German, I could speak to all prospective clients in Germany with ease.