Judith doesn’t particularly relish this ritual exercise of writing about herself in the third person.
I was born in the early seventies in Paris of two French parents, one of semi-Austrian descent, hence the (mangled) German-sounding and -looking name. I grew up in the countryside; moved back to Paris for my late high-school years; and I graduated from one of the last schools of the French Armed Forces in what had been, until then, West Germany.
It was interesting, I must say, being in the country when the Berlin Wall fell. I remember hearing about it on the radio and crying with joy (all while brushing my teeth; this is the sort of dignified moments my life offers). German was my first foreign language, which I’d started learning at age eleven, and it felt really good to share that liberation of energy.
After the baccalauréat (Math & Humanities, English and German, mention bien if that means anything) I chose to concentrate my studies on cinema. I started a long period of meandering— Hey, isn’t that what college is for? The degree itself meant little to me — degrees aren’t very useful in that milieu, anyway the learning part was what I liked — and so I hung about university a while, crushing on professors and the like.
In our language course the teacher asked us to hand in movie reviews in English… I think I had mine on a floppy, perhaps I could post it here someday. The same fellow introduced me to William Gibson by pushing Mona Lisa Overdrive at us; I owe him a debt of gratitude. I could say that I blame movies and university for this era, the moment when I started speaking English fluently and began to neglect my old friend German, but since I’d been a movie buff from a much younger age, and my first translations were Beatles songs, it would be rather dishonest.
In the nineties, through an internship for virtual video editing, I found myself caught up in the internet craze and learned on the job how to edit web pages, organize information, bookmark useless sites. In short, I learned to surf the WWW and talk to computers, which meant a lot of reading and speaking (a mangled, sometimes, sort of) English.
In time, this culminated into six years as an expatriate in Luxembourg during which I spent most of my time de facto translating from one language to the other, be it English to French or Engineer to Suit or, once I’d been promoted unexpectedly to head a multinational team, Executive to Executant. I say it was unexpected because I’d gone in to ask for a promotion to the loner position of Information Architect… Quite the difference.
The heady, heady times before the infamous bubble did burst have been well rhapsodized about, by more talented (and richer) than me; I will not expound on them here much further.
Suffice it to say that along with being given a chance to learn new skills, I strongly appreciate the personal confidence I have gained from using both those and the older competences I’d brought to my job in the first place. Forced to assess what was left after our collective ears had popped, I had to draw the inevitable conclusion that helping people understand each other is an activity I particularly enjoy.
Still, we all have our limits, and my endurance had been stretched very thin by a long period of hard work and a few cycles of classic “pre-launch(es)” overtime. In consequence, before this newfound personal knowledge drove me to a new university course, I retreated from the physical world a while: 2+ years of getting to know my inner pandemonium and its population while writing thousands of words (about which the less is said here, the better). To keep feeding the beast, I did bilingual secretarial work for a while.
Sane, if not unscathed, I eventually ventured out again in search of official recognition of my abilities, and joined the ITI-RI’s program for a Masters in Literary Translation in 2006.
And here we are.
