I've always been a language aficionada. Today I
want to share my personal love story with language with you ❤️
🇦🇹 🇮🇷 I’m born and raised in Vienna, Austria in an Austrian-Persian family, and therefore bilingual German-Farsi.
As a child, my favourite cartoons were „Dog of Flanders“ (known in German as „Niklaas, ein Junge aus Flandern“) and „Alfred J. Kwak“, set in Belgium and the Netherlands (❗️spoiler alert: important fact❗️).
And I looooved to watch language courses! Austrian TV broadcasted courses English, French and Russian, and I barely missed an episode.
It got even more fun when I started reading. Imagine a 6-year-old Susan, trying to pronounce „qu’est-ce que c’est“ 😵💫🤣
By the age of 12, I knew that I definitely wanted to do „something with language“ later. So I started French and Latin in school, and I also picked up some Italian.
When I grew older, I realised that „mainstream“ languages were not my cup of tea. I wanted to work with languages not everyone knows.
Which brought me to Dutch Linguistics and Literature - remember my favourite cartoons as a child?! 😉 - and Scandinavian Studies, including lessons Afrikaans, Swedish and Old Norse.
🇳🇱 🇧🇪 From this time on, Dutch and Flemish have been a big part of my life.
I graduated with a PhD on the role of transculturality in intertextual references in the novels of Kader Abdolah (a Dutch writer of Iranian origin), and was a university assistant and lecturer for literature and Dutch.
I eventually became a translator for Dutch to German in 2010, and I moved to Flanders in 2014, where I live with - not Niklaas and his dog 😉 - my partner and my CAT tools Snorri and Heimdall.
And although I found the language of my heart, I‘m still fascinated by all those interesting, exciting and beautiful languages and dialects out there ❤️