Art in Other Words
My expertise can help you maintain a reputation for meeting the expectations of a discerning audience. As an independent professional, personally offering you translations from German/French into English, I am the perfect third point in the triangle of writer, translator and customer, because I will make certain that none of the care that has gone into creating a project gets lost. Specialisms include architecture, art, automotive, culinary, music, religion, travel and also MTPE.
For your musical projects, I can bring specialist knowledge and skills to, say, liner notes and prefaces to scholarly editions, as I have done for CDs of Messiaen.
Through both study and travel, I have gained a thorough knowledge of art and architecture in France, Germany, Austria and Switzerland. In art, I am especially interested in the Renaissance and in the work of Brueghel, Van Eyck, Rembrandt and Dürer. In architecture, I specialise in the Medieval and Baroque periods, and particularly the Bavarian Rococo Church.
In texts concerning (e.g.) the work of a museum in Graz or the restoration of a monument in Saint-Denis (Paris), I can guarantee accurate and promptly delivered texts faithful to the register and tone of the original German or French.
If you require work on MTPE (Machine Translation Post Editing), I can offer you my experience of editing many such files, particularly in the automotive industry.
In forty years of teaching, performing and travelling I have always been willing to give something extra, to perform an additional service if I can. I can help you with culturally adapted material especially in classical music, art, architecture and travel.
Hello, my name is Roger Rayner and I am happy to welcome you to my site, where I hope you will find much to interest you.
I hold a Master’s degree from Trinity College, Cambridge, studied at the Royal Academy of Music, London, and am an Associate Member of the ITI (Institute of Translators and Interpreters) and a member of UNIVERSITAS Austria and Mediterranean Editors and Translators (MET).
What is translation?
It’s easy to think that there is an equivalent word in another language for every word in English, and vice versa. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Try machine-translating the phrase, “Out of sight, out of mind,” into Russian, and then back-translating it into English. Whatever the result, just hope it doesn’t return, “Invisible idiot.”
Even playing Haydn in his own house but on a modern piano is a form of translation…
The UNIVERSITAS logo is designed to show the sort of things that can so easily go wrong in translation, and reveals the need for a professional translator. The German word Hahn can mean a rooster, or a tap! We use the word ‘purple’ to mean a particular colour (at least, in the UK); yet the German equivalent Purpur indicates a different, redder, shade to ours. There are different ways of achieving emphasis in different languages. In French, which lacks the strong “beats” of German and English, this is quite a complicated matter. Germans sometimes place the most important word at the beginning or end of a sentence, yet such word placing does not necessarily work in English. In German, thoughts are expressed in a set order of time – manner – place, and while such a way of putting things can often be left untouched in translation, it can also, in some cases, be strangely difficult for the reader to unravel. This is where the translator comes in to make decisions as to how to render the original text as if it had first been written in English.
…always in time and in good quality, attentive to the requirements
-Margarita Gress, Alchemy Translations
RS Translations 