My name is David Heitler and I translate from German into British English – and I am your man if you need a text that flows well, that convinces people or that sells something.

Unless otherwise required, I translate to appeal to the broadest possible readership. To this end I strive to make my texts easy and pleasurable to read – even if they have not always been written that way in the original.

My other big advantage is that it is no problem for me to chat with my clients in German over the phone.

As far as my specialist subjects are concerned, I have chosen some of them myself – and some of them have chosen me! They are:

Management
This includes consultancy assessment literature and questionnaires, human resources strategy programmes and documents, and various PowerPoint presentations and virtual classrooms.

Marketing
This includes assessments and proposals, advertising (I particularly enjoy making advertising literature “sing” the same way in English as it does (or sometimes does not!) in German), strategy outlines, etc.

Music
I spent my first pocket money on classical records and was a classical music freak throughout my teens and in the mid-eighties I did a lot of translating of the classical music blurb on CDs for Sony Classical, when they were located in Hamburg. Currently I do a lot of translating for smaller German CD labels.

Oil and Gas Industry
This is one that chose me! In my work as a teacher of English for business, I have spent a lot of time with people from the drilling and gas industries, and I have often had to translate material about, among other things, underground gas storage facilities, gas treatment plants, the response of the gas industry to the new European directives concerning the opening up of the gas market, and various press releases.

Alternative Energies
Some client companies are diversifying into renewable power generation and I also regularly translate press releases for a company that is developing Fuel Cell Heating Units.

Gastronomy
Once upon a time in the long distant past I trained to be a chef at the Savoy Hotel, London, then cooked in France for a year and in Germany for a year and a half (Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten in Hamburg) before changing my career in 1981! So I am a complete and utter foodie! I am especially good at translating recipes so that they will taste the same – even though the ingredients that you can buy are different – in different countries. Nowadays, cooking is a great hobby of mine – and it’s much better that way than as a job!

Another thing I have enjoyed working on is radio or TV scripts. One of my first jobs was translating a children’s musical and more recently I wrote a radio play as part of an English course for PONS Verlag (Grosser Anfängerkurs – English at Work, 2000).

My work is best if I can translate one day, and then sleep on it and review my work the next day. Then my translations are always accompanied with a covering email that highlights any ambiguities in the original text, any parts of the text that are weak or difficult to understand and any parts of the text that I did not understand at all (here, if it were my own customer, I would ring them up and ask them to explain what they meant in German).

Of course if a customer wants a translation quickly I can usually translate it so that the meaning is clear, but not always so that it flows beautifully, within a few hours.

I have a bank account in Germany so it is easy and inexpensive to pay me in Euros by direct transfer.