For several decades I worked full-time, on-site, inside busy international technical projects. The work was multilingual from day one:
Daily communications across teams and organisations in multiple languages, technical translation for civil construction, automotive and maritime clients, interpreting in meetings and contract negotiations, producing documentation that had to be understood by engineers, crew and regulators alike. I managed and recruited maritime crews for Dutch companies — coordinating training, certification and paperwork for teams drawn from across Europe and beyond. I sourced suppliers, liaised with local agents and transport providers worldwide, maintained multilingual databases and glossaries, and produced everything from risk assessments to onboarding materials to project status reports. All of it under real deadline pressure, in environments where unclear communication had immediate and tangible consequences.
Before that I worked in congress and event management in Berlin, at a time when that beloved madhouse of mine still had three functioning (!) airports. I had moved there when the wall was still standing. Later, with the building frenzy that followed reunification and after three years in the Italian South in between, I spent two years handling deliveries for a large German-Italian civil construction site in the city, on-site from sunrise to sunset. Technical translations, interpreting in meetings and site inspections and managing the bureaucratic procedures for 150 Italian workers on that site. It was an excellent school. You saw what you talked about, at every moment. And you learned about working realities that no academy teaches — including the informal technical vocabulary that only exists on site.
A light well: bocca di lupo — wolf’s mouth. A chisel: piede di porco — pig’s foot. Language as it is actually used, under pressure, between people who need to understand each other immediately. That is the environment I come from.
What connects all of it is this: complex environments, international teams, multiple languages and the constant need to make sure that the right information reaches the right people in a form they can actually act on. That is what I have always done. I now do it remotely and on-site for smaller maritime and offshore operators, coastal restoration projects and international technical teams — where the work is serious but the overhead needs to stay lean. The BSc. in Environmental Studies (Open University UK) keeps that interest grounded in something more than goodwill. I work in German, English, Dutch, and Italian.
Working as an independent contributor means I bring something a permanent team member rarely can: No internal politics, no accumulated assumptions and a clear outside view of where the real gaps are.
In some projects I help establish communication and documentation structures from the start. In others, I step in later to reconstruct information flows and documentation history — a process I sometimes refer to as project archaeology. I know how to get up to speed quickly, work reliably under pressure and leave things better documented than I found them.
If your project needs someone who has genuinely been in the room — and knows what it takes to make complex technical environments communicate — I would be glad to hear about it.