Translator Paula Truyens on her nomadic life

Sworn translator Dutch to English and long-standing SENSE member Paula Truyens (in the photo standing between former SENSE members Joan Shoheb and Vivien Cook in Inverness last year) has been pondering whether to emigrate to Vietnam or Cambodia to teach English to small kids. But changing countries or even continents is not new to her, having lived in South Africa, Lesotho, the Netherlands, Spain and now France. In the following interview, she expands on what she calls her ‘nomadic genes’ and why she is considering Asia too.

I understand that you were born in South Africa. Can you tell us a bit about where you are from?

Sometimes I tell people I was born in a big barn in South Africa. Imagine the world’s first heart transplant being performed in a barn! That is, of course, Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town. My grandparents emigrated to South Africa in the 1950s. Work was quite scarce after World War II and the Dutch government encouraged families to immigrate and financially assisted them. Opa had learnt the art of making sausages and deli meats in Germany, where he had been put to work by the occupiers. He used to smuggle thin slabs of bacon wrapped around his belly back home to Amsterdam. I wonder what would have happened had he been found out… His sausage-making skills stood him in good stead to co-found a butchery in Cape Town. As a small tot, the European deli meats didn’t really appeal to my taste. It was with bits of biltong and boerewors that Opa won my affections.

My grandparents sent their children to a Catholic school, where all the classes were in English and you could take Afrikaans as an optional subject. Once the brood had mastered English, they took to speaking that at home rather than Dutch – mostly so that ‘ma en pa’ wouldn’t be able to follow most of what they were saying.

My mother went to Cape Town University, where she met my father. Their relationship was very casual and brief and I didn’t get to know him that well. After he’d moved to Long Island (New York) in the 1970s to start practising as a paediatrician, I visited him in New York City – just before 9/11 – and learnt that he had both Scottish and Irish ancestry. I also seem to have inherited my love for ballroom dancing and all manner of fauna from him. He even had a spider collection.

Despite strict apartheid rules during the 1960s and 1970s, there were non-white students at the university, and a chance encounter between my mother and Elisabeth, a Xhosa student, radically changed the course of our lives. Elisabeth invited my mother to her home in one of Cape Town’s segregated townships, planting in my mother the seeds of resistance to apartheid. She took part in silent anti-apartheid protests at the university and gave covert art workshops for children in the townships of Langa and Gugulethu with a group of students. These ‘subversive political activities’ didn’t go unnoticed and when she found out that her phone had been tapped, decided to pack up the bare necessities and leave South Africa. Fortunately, she was offered a job as an English teacher at Masitise High School in Lesotho, in the Quthing district (yes, a click word!). We didn’t learn until much later that the principal, Frank Lebentlele, had been Nelson Mandela’s zoology teacher at Healdtown, a mission school in the Eastern Cape (South Africa). To this day I have fond memories of Mr Lebentlele, who welcomed us into his family, accommodated us for the first few months and taught my mother the fine art of gardening.

In 1982, after I’d completed my O levels at Machabeng College in Maseru and the SA Defence Force had in that same year crossed into Lesotho to liquidate members of the African National Congress political party (killing a total of 42 people, including innocent bystanders), my mother felt it wise to uproot and move again. But this time not only to another country but to another continent. As my mother had always kept her Dutch nationality, the Netherlands was the logical choice.

You have been a SENSE member since 2010. Where did you hear about the Society? Were you already living in the Netherlands by then?

Yes, I was already living in Utrecht and had just started my first job as an in-house translator, in Zeist. I actually studied biology at Utrecht University, fruit flies to be precise, but like many students in my year I ended up in a completely different profession. One friend is now a choirmaster and conducts a small orchestra and another friend from my year writes code. At some point in my studies the idea of working in a lab, grinding up fruit flies or doing any kind of research on animals, became ever less appealing. At the time I had a side job as an attendant on the Alpen Express train, as I had to earn money to supplement my student grant. One of the travellers (to Bourg St. Maurice, if I remember correctly) struck up a conversation and asked if I enjoyed my job. I told him it was only a side gig and that I’d managed to get it because I spoke Dutch, French and English. I was studying biology but hoped to pursue a career in writing or translating in STEM fields. ‘So, you’re a biology student and English is your mother tongue… I happen to need a small leaflet on antibiotics for plants translated from Dutch into English. Might that interest you?’ It was my first ever translation job and the 900 guilders I got for it seemed like a fortune at the time. Don’t ask me about the quality, but the client seemed happy.

Soon after, I enrolled in a three-year part-time translation course at Hieronymus Hogeschool. Shortly after obtaining my diploma, I was sworn as a Dutch to English translator at the District Court of Utrecht. In that same year I was hired as an in-house translator by an agency in Zeist. A few years ago I learnt that the company had been bought by Powerling and many staff members were let go.

A colleague at work, former SENSE member Jill Whittaker, told me about SENSE and if I remember correctly, we both joined at the same time.

I believe you are currently living in France. Why did you decide to settle there?

This is turning out to be as much about my mother as about me, but I suppose that’s inevitable when providing some background for the ‘nomadic genes’. She never really settled in the Netherlands and in 1987 decided to move to a sunnier climate. A friend of hers had a small holiday home in France, in the foothills of the Pyrenees. After a visit to her friend she fell in love with the area, especially with the open spaces and mountains that reminded her of our beloved Lesotho. It is said that Tolkien’s inspiration for his Middle Earth books was born in the Drakensberg mountain range between Lesotho and KwaZulu-Natal. Some of the mountain walks I’ve done with friends in the Pyrenees, past wild horses and tranquil mountain lakes, made us wonder if we might come across a trio of petrified trolls.

After working for the translation agency in Zeist for nine years and an agency in Rotterdam for four years, I was itching to travel again but also spread my wings and become a freelance translator. ‘Why not move to Sarrecave?’, my mother suggested. ‘I’ll divide my two-acre piece of land into three smaller plots, you have the bottom one, your brother the top one and I’ll stay in the middle one with the house.’ A former sheep shed and a 1970s caravan would be enough to get me started, we figured. Thanks to the French way of doing things, it was only ten years later that the new zoning plan, which had been in the works for as many years, was finally approved by all the relevant organismes publics and I could build a small wooden chalet on my piece of land. Living like a tsigane, or ‘traveller’, for ten years meant I was able to save enough money not only to buy a small studio on the Spanish coast but also to put up the chalet without needing a loan. It was only last year that the final project – a septic tank – was completed and at long last I had a flushing toilet and hot shower. No, I lie – last week a neighbour and I manoeuvred a 1000-litre rainwater harvesting butt into place and connected it to the spout.

I guess you now speak Afrikaans, English, Dutch, Spanish and French. Is that so? Do you work in all those languages?

Because I went to an English Waldorf school in Cape Town, I never learnt Afrikaans, although my mother could speak it a bit. We always spoke English at home and in Lesotho I learnt Sesotho as well as a bit of French, thanks to Swiss friends with whom we shared a former colonial house in Maseru (Lesotho was once a British Crown colony).

My French keeps getting better, having learnt it at a fairly young age and now being immersed in it. But my Spanish is also coming along nicely, as I regularly go to my studio near Malaga and even lived and worked there briefly. After two years I decided I much preferred the uncomplicated French autoentrepreneur regime for the self-employed to the almost Kafkaesque autonomo regime and other formalities in Spain. The nomad wandered up north again.

I only translate from Dutch into English. Although I speak Dutch almost fluently and am more than confident when communicating with clients in Dutch, I’ve never considered translating into Dutch. There are always imperfections in my written Dutch, as I never learnt it properly at school and am constantly having to look up if it’s a ‘de’ or ‘het’ word or ‘bedoeld’ or ‘bedoelt’. I had to struggle to get a 6 for Dutch at high school in The Hague (pre-university education). My grade for English was 9 and I got a 7 for French.

Have you perceived a shrinking in demand for traditional translation work due to AI? Is that at the core of your search for a new path in Cambodia or Vietnam?

Yes, especially from translation agencies. Over the past four or five years, a number of agencies I used to work for have been bought by the usual suspects in a series of mergers and acquisitions. Before then, the rates were good and communication with the project managers, who tended to stay with the agency for several years, was always personal and pleasant. This started to change, with jobs being offered through impersonal job notification emails sent to several translators at once. Whoever clicks first on ‘accept’ in the agency’s online portal gets the job. Fast-forward to now and the jobs are almost exclusively ‘Translation 2.0’, a fuzzy euphemism for correcting disjointed machine translation (MT) output at pitiful rates. For a while I took on the occasional Translation 2.0 job when business was slow but decided last year that it wasn’t worth it. I’m still registered with one of those agencies but as I’ve not heard from them for some time, I’m sure I’ve ended up on their ‘too expensive, only use in an emergency’ list.

Luckily, I still get a steady flow of work from a number of boutique agencies and direct customers, so I’m not panicking – yet. It’s actually a nice way to ease into partial retirement. The reduced workload gives me more time to focus on other projects I’ve been wanting to take up. Refining my gardening skills (thanks Mom and Mr Lebentlele). Improving my French. Or finally starting a CELTA course in Toulouse with my CPD budget… for a possible new adventure in Cambodia or Vietnam. I think it’s those nomadic genes but also the desire to branch out into something different. Migrate to a new continent and teach English to young kids. Although I’ve heard that the booming international start-up ecosystem in Malaga is in need of local workers whose English is up to the task. Mind you, I’d have to navigate those Spanish formalities again.

A few months ago, you posted on the Forum about your mother’s teaching to small kids in Darjeeling, India. Can you tell us about that? Are you considering India as well?

My mother and I travelled to India in 1989 and spent five weeks trekking from Mumbai to Ganeshpuri, Pune, Goa, the Thekkady nature reserve, Kerala, Bengaluru and back to Mumbai by bus and train. I remember the long wait at dreary, soulless Charles de Gaulle for our connecting flight to Toulouse after all the colour and vibrancy of India. The beautiful salwar kameez I’d donned that morning suddenly looked entirely out of place among all the grey suits in the aeroport. India was unlike any European or African country we’d been to. We were enchanted.

Just after I moved to France in 2009, my mother was invited to Darjeeling by her French yoga teacher. He was involved in a number of projects there and they were looking for someone to help improve the level of teaching at a Tibetan primary school in Kalimpong, a small town not far from Darjeeling. My mother had written a number of educational readers for Macmillan, later Nelson Thornes, so she agreed to give it a try. Initially she helped one of the teachers bring more structure into her English lessons. She saw that the school had few to no books for the children to read and that good quality readers were not only expensive but also not always culturally adapted. It didn’t take long for her to jump into writing some readers herself. And if she could get friends and family to help with the costs of printing, the booklets could even be free.

I’ve kept in touch by email with Yangzom, the English teacher my mother worked with. After my mother passed away in 2021, we decided to honour her memory by keeping the reader project alive on www.lotusreaders.com. I’ve uploaded a few of the readers and hope to have them all online by next year. My mother had started writing Gesar of Ling, a story based on a Tibetan heroic epic. Yangzom reckons I could easily finish the story and that it would be wonderful… maybe I will. In any case, I would love to travel to Darjeeling to see what inspired my mother and meet the people she knew. I occasionally get an email from a former pupil who says it was Hannie-la who encouraged them to do well at school and now they’re training to be a teacher.

What do you like to do when you are not translating or travelling?

I love my daily walks in the fields and woods around our village with my dog Jo, who pitched up out of nowhere ten years ago and decided to adopt me. My garden also takes up a lot of time, especially now that I’ve started a vegetable plot and my fruit trees, hedges and meadow lawn need to be kept in check on a regular basis. I used to do aikido here in our tiny village in La Profonde France but gave that up when I moved to Spain. It’s something I’ve been considering taking up again, although qigong or tai chi is probably more doable for me. Aikido was great fun but also quite hard.

My reading group of Dutch expats gets together once every two months to discuss a book but mostly to enjoy a meal and good wine afterwards. Where possible I get the English translation of the book we will be reading. Is that cheating?

Can you recommend us some reading?

I recently read two of the books suggested in our reading group in French, Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘Les Inseperables’ and ‘En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule’ by Édouard Louis. I was pleasantly surprised by how much I understood. And reading the books in French seemed to give me a better feel for the characters and cultural context. The most recent book we discussed was ‘The Tobacconist’ by Austrian writer Robert Seethaler. First I read it in English, then I watched the film in German. I must say I enjoyed the film more than the book, probably because of the language and exquisite cinematography (Der Trafikant). Some of you will know Marcel Lemmens from Teamwork, who recommended this beautiful book on LinkedIn. Thanks Marcel!

We’re currently reading ‘Buat’ by Jean-Marc van Tol – a doorstop of a book about the relationship between raadpensionaris Johan de Witt and his ritmeester Buat, Henri de Fleury de Coulan (1622–1666). It’s only been published in Dutch, so it’s just as well I’d already decided to read it in Dutch!

Also worthy of mention is Rutger Bregman’s ‘Humankind: A Hopeful History’. I finished it in one go and, as Stephen Fry so aptly put it, it is ‘hugely, highly and happily recommended’.