Meet Sarah, member of the Kalliopé team

Every month, Kalliopé invites you to discover the portrait of an employee or translator. Today, we focus on Sarah, a member of the Kalliopé team. For the past 3 years, Sarah has been project manager at the Kalliopé agency.

Sarah was born of West Indian and Haitian parents. She grew up in a family where several languages were spoken. Her interest in the world’s different cultures has grown with every encounter. When she entered high school, she decided to follow a literary path, studying English and Italian. This choice led her to spend a year in Italy as an Erasmus student, a trip that fascinated her. Back in France, she realized that her career path was too theoretical, so she decided to do a professional Master’s degree in translation at Paris 7. Thanks to her background, in 2010 she began freelancing for 3 years. In 2014, she joined the Kalliopé team as project manager.

Passion and organization.

Her job is to find the right person or people to meet the customer’s specific needs. From then on, she is in charge of the entire translation process. She is the mediator between the translator and the customer. The project manager needs to know everything, because he’s the one who makes the job run smoothly. When the translation is finished, she takes care of proofreading and formatting. Her work requires a strong sense of organization. An organization that was put to work a week after his arrival in January 2014. Right from the start, she was in charge of a very big project: the redesign of a website. This involved translating the content into a dozen languages, including Asian languages such as Korean. On this project, she remembers always being accompanied by her little sheet of paper on which she wrote down absolutely everything. A great introduction that quickly integrated her into the Kalliopé team.

Sarah believes that in our world, we can’t do without translation. Simply knowing English is not enough. She explains, for example, that she works with a hotel group for whom she provides translations in all languages. This work is essential, because even if tourists are more or less fluent in English, some information needs to be translated into their own language. Foreigners need to have information translated by people who know their culture, for a concrete, hard-hitting approach.

Sarah’s Chinese portrait:

If you were a language?

“Italian. It’s a language I discovered when I was in high school, by chance because they offered the option. Despite my English studies, I wanted to continue with Italian and that’s why I left for a year. It’s a language with a very rich history, and it’s also a very pretty, lilting language, which smells of sunshine.”

If you were a country?

“Finland. It’s a country I discovered quite by chance, thanks to some Finnish friends. I’ve been lucky enough to go there twice, and it’s a country that’s so different from anything I’ve seen before. In this country, it’s the place of nature that appeals to me, with its many lakes and forests.”

If you were a culture?

“I’d like to be a mix of different cultures. Taking lots of things from my parents’ culture and others from my friends’ culture. I’d be like a new culture: a cosmopolitan culture.”