A fresh start made easy

Solveig Rose-Mollard joined Klein Wolf Peters as a Key Account Manager in June 2020. As a native speaker of German and a certified translator and conference interpreter for French and English with a wealth of industry experience, Solveig also supports our German team. She is the perfect point of contact for all your language-related enquiries. Now that she’s settled in, we asked her to share her first impressions.

 

• Solveig, how was your first month at the company – especially in light of the coronavirus pandemic that’s going on?

My onboarding all went very smoothly. Everything at Klein Wolf Peters is so well organised that it didn’t take me long to find my feet. All my colleagues were really supportive, helping me quickly learn the ropes and get to grips with all the ins and outs of the work processes.

Klein Wolf Peters places a huge emphasis on flexibility and work-life balance. To facilitate this, the company was already set up to work virtually and was acing it even before the pandemic struck! Asking questions is straightforward and there’s always someone on hand to help at (almost) any time of day or night.

 

• What does your job involve?

I assist Ronald Erlandsson-Klein with anything and everything to do with operations management: providing quotes, assigning jobs, invoicing, responding to queries – to name just a few examples. We’re the link between our customers and our team of translators and editors.

Speaking of customer contact, it’s my job as a project manager to take direct feedback, which might not always be pleasant. So far, though, I’ve heard nothing but praise. Some customers have even congratulated me on joining such an “amazing, committed team”. I found that really remarkable, and it confirmed that my choice to join the company was the right one. I love how everyone is on the same wavelength and pulls together to produce the very best content for our customers based on their requirements – that all made it very easy for me to settle in.

 

• Can you give an example of real challenges you face as a translator?

Concepts that exist in one language but not another are really tricky to translate. A popular example is the German word Gemütlichkeit, which conveys the idea of warmth, friendliness, belonging and good cheer all rolled into one. And then there’s Vorfreude, used to express a sense of joyous, excited anticipation. In French, my first foreign language and the language of my heart, you look forward to something with “impatience” and “haste”, but this doesn’t express the idea of joy like in German, in the same way that “excitement” doesn’t in English. Once, when I explained this to a friend, her response was: “you mean those poor people can’t just be happy thinking about a future event without getting impatient?”

It’s a funny anecdote, but a conundrum that can apply to a whole host of situations, some of them serious. Providing a correct and appropriate translation without going into a lengthy explanation can be a real headache sometimes.

 

• Do you have a motto?

It’s not a motto as such but more of a guiding principle: before I let something get to me, I ask myself how long whatever it might be is really going to impact my life. Is it an hour? A day? A month? At some point I decided something was only worth getting worked up about if the answer was more than six months. And how often does that happen anyway? That saves a lot of stress – for me and for those around me 😊.

As a project manager, it’s my job to reconcile the various requirements and interests of all the individuals involved. And to do that, I believe a calm and composed approach is essential.