Astrid Elke Witte, born in 1957

Born in Yorkshire, England, with an English father and a Northern German mother, Astrid's interest in languages developed when she was still a child. Already at the age of eight she was reading an English grammar book in bed every night and, to this day, she makes it a point to hone her English to a high, professional standard. She studied English (including Linguistics), French and Divinity at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, being awarded the degree of Bachelor of Divinity in 1988. Following graduation, she completed a one-year course in Commercial French and German, along with advanced word processing skills, in turn leading to the London Chamber of Commerce and similar qualifications, where she notably gained distinction in translating from and summarising German.

She has been working in Germany as a translator since 1997.

She spent most of 1998 translating a book from German into English about the economy, industry and educational and research system in Saxony-Anhalt. From Autumn 1998 until the end of 2004 she was employed at the offices of patent and trademark lawyers in Munich as a legal secretary, so that it was simply a logical consequence for her to specialise, as a translator, in intellectual property. Has experience translating

• briefs, decisions and judgements on trademark infringements, as well as design and utility model infringements
• oppositions and substantiations of oppositions on Community trademarks
• nullity suits and cancellation actions
• appeals, grounds of appeal
• protective briefs
• preliminary injunctions in trademark cases
• certificates of registration in home country
• priority documents
• lists of goods and services
• trademark certificates
• warning letters and cease and desist undertakings
• a commentary on the German Design Model Act

Since 2005, she has, in a freelance environment, also gained extensive experience in translating agreements, terms and conditions of business, company law documents, financial documentation, annual financial statements, annual reports, income statements, management reports (with her combined financial and accounting translation experience amounting to some 280,000 words as at February 2012) and documents of a similar nature.

Upon obtaining the internationally highly esteemed Diploma in Translation from the Chartered Institute of Linguists (officially recognised in the UK as being equivalent to a Master's Degree) in the language combination German > English in the subjects of General Translation, Business and Law, in 2004 she became a Member of the Institute of Linguists.

SDL Trados Studio 2019 and SDL MultiTerm expert. In this way, we ensure terminologically consistent translations and the use of existing customer wording, as far as this is advisable in individual cases. This means that in areas of specialisation that require this (in particular law, intellectual property law, financial reporting), translations or editing jobs are done in such a way that each repeating technical term or turn of phrase of equal meaning in its context is translated by the same term or turn of phrase. Read more on the page "CPD/What's new".

Astrid's main language pair is German to English. However, she has to date translated at least 270,000 words in French to English (status: November 2021). Fields have included intellectual property (including patent claims), court documents, real estate, contract law, company law, general business translation and administrative law.

For the past 11 years she has had a very fruitful co-operation with Sebastian Witte, working full-time, during which the couple have built up their own quite extensive terminological databases, enabling them to tackle various specialist fields with terminological precision. They got married in December 2014.