Roderick Darby

Born near Birmingham in 1943, I attended King Edward VI School there from 1954 to 1961, offering English, French and German at 'A' level. I read Law at Christ Church, Oxford, from 1962 to 1965. From 1965 to 1970 I worked for Barclays Bank DCO in Malta, Paris, Algiers and Accra. From 1970 I worked in fund management and stock broking in Frankfurt and London before going to Australia in 1974. My two daughters were born there in 1974 and 1976. At first I worked for a merchant bank, then later for IBM as a systems engineer, mainly writing banking software. When I returned to Germany in 1978 I set up as a freelance programmer, writing a successful bookkeeping program (over 200 copies sold). I was running my own computer school in Hamburg when the Wall came down in 1989, and in 1990 we started teaching in Schwerin, Mecklenburg. We soon added a bookkeeping service (using my software), and later grew into a fully-fledged accounting and tax consulting business. It was at this time that I started freelance auditing for Deloitte & Touche. As I became increasingly involved in translating for Deloitte, I took the sworn translator exam in 2000 and the financial translator exam at the Chamber of Commerce in Hamburg in 2001. In 2005 I sold my accounting practice in Schwerin and in 2006 moved to southwest France. I translate almost exclusively German into English for large auditing firms (Deloitte and KPMG). I am a member of the BDÜ and the IAPTI.