Home away from Home

How do you decide to become an interpreter? Which dreams does one have as a child? How do you prepare for this sort of career? How do you end up, where you want to go?  

Every single interpreter would answer these questions differently, but for me, the path to becoming an interpreter for Dutch began in the Netherlands. In Callantsoog, Schagen, Noord-Holland to be precise. Callantsoog is one of those hundreds of villages on the Dutch coast where you tend to hear nearly more German than Dutch during the summer. One of those German voices was mine. Whether I was a screaming baby in a cod, a babbling toddler at the beach, happily screaming 10-year-old on her birthday, a teenager singing along to the newest summerhits or as an adult ordering coffee.

Thanks to my grandparents, I love the Netherlands as much as I do. Well before I was born they had decided that holidays feel much more like and adventure when the people around you speak a different language. So, they decided to not go to the German coast but instead travel to the Dutch beaches. From my hometown Münster it really doesn’t matter in terms of travel time. The sea is roughly 3,5 hours away, whether you drive to the North or West. BUT in the Netherlands they speak Dutch, which is decisively not German and makes everything feel more foreign, exotic, and like a holiday.

Why exactly they chose Callantsoog I couldn’t tell you, but I do know that my grandparents, mother, and aunt stayed very faithful to it for years to come. First they pitched tents on the camping grounds, then bought a small caravan, and finally, 6 years before I was made my entrance on the scene they invested in an 11 m-long caravan and a permanent space at their beloved camping grounds. And so, I breathed Dutch air and sea breezes for the first time when I was a mere 6 months old.

That caravan did become a second home to my grandparents. They spend every summer there, in fact, we hardly saw them between April and October. They only returned to the house we shared with them in Münster to allow my parents, brother, and I to spend the better part of the school’s summer holiday there. Two weeks in Holland with mum and two with dad. That’s how the summer holidays worked. For years. For all of them.

With every passing year the caravan, camping grounds, and village grew more familiar; I met the same kids, made holiday friends, and expected to see the head gardener cutting the grass by the main entrance and Rateltje – the kids club’s mascot – riding his bicycle while calling for all the children to come to the Praathuus. That was the clubhouse where Rateltje lived and the staff arranged crafts every morning, football tournaments, bicycle tours or bobby car races in the afternoons, and board games or bingo right before bedtime. Sometimes they even held a kids’ disco, so one got to stay up until after 9 pm!

Most of the Praathuus staff spoke German, so that my younger brother and I could easily partake in all the activities. We understood how to make a little talisman and sew the little pouch that goes with it. They told us how many players would make up a team. And if there was a Dutch celebrity on the Charades-card we were told to ignore it or could get other help.Unfortunately, the kids themselves were rather harshly split into two camps: The Germans and the Dutch. After all, there aren’t that many six-year-olds that speak a foreign language fluently.

The older I got, the more likely it became that Dutch kids my age were learning German in school, however, whether they were willing to speak that language during their holidays and to a native was a completely different story…

One of my holiday friends at some point decided that she wanted to be able to be on any team and play cops and robbers with any available child. So, she started learning Dutch by herself. To my 8-year old ears, it sounded magical. Suddenly, she hissed like all the Dutch kids did, and actually managed to communicate with them. Looking back, I have no idea how correctly or fluently she really spoke , but I was ever so impressed.Not only because she had taught herself a foreign language, but also and especially, because of the doors this opened for her. Now, she could take a seat at any of the craft tables, she’d understand the instructions. Because she played football or volleyball against us (the Germans) more often than not, as she understood her Dutch team members. Because she was able to tell the younger kids of either nationality on the playground that they could just tell us to stop if and when the merry-go-round went too fast ,and because at least twice she returned a lost toddler to their parents because she understood what the issue was as well as the description of how the caravan or tent looked that the toddler escaped from.

Sadly, I did not stay in contact with this holiday friend and don’t know if she still travels to the Netherlands or still speaks the language. But, from today’s perspective, she and her ability to connect people of different nationalities, inspired me just as much as my love for Callantsoog and that home-away-from-home-feeling it’s always given me, to learn all the languages and become an interpreter. Even though, back then, in 2003, I hadn’t the foggiest idea what an interpreter was.

It took me another 20 years to get an interpreter diploma. But during those 20 years, I went back to Callantsoog regularly. I actually was there last weekend. Staying in the same caravan on the same camping grounds. Although those have been updated, renovated, and modernised, they still distinctly feel like a part of me and my history. Then as today to me, Dutch sounds like the sea, the beach, a Frikandel special with extra sand on it and holidays. That is surely another reason why I work with the language; I want to hear it, speak it, and use it as much as possible.