Rasmus has been working as a Senior Editor for English to Danish and vice-versa at Unbabel for five years. He found out about us thanks to a friend while he was looking for ways to supplement his income during his studies.

Rasmus is from a small city in the countryside of Denmark, close to Billund, where Legoland is located, so perhaps it’s no coincidence that he loves to build things from scratch. Rasmus studies Production Technology, and is always looking for effective solutions to all kinds of problems, including bad translations. He definitely uses his passion for problem-solving in his work as an editor. “I want to have a deep understanding of the source text and most importantly, the context,” he says.

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​His passion for building and meticulously planning things has helped him to work as a translator, but the most significant thing for being a successful editor is Rasmus’s love for his native tongue. “I love how dialects and word usage can vary so much in such a small country.” His favorite Danish dialect is Bornholmsk, from the island of Bornholm, just off the southern coast of Sweden. It’s a mix of Eastern Danish and Southern Swedish dialects, so different that some Danish people don’t even understand it!

Rasmus believes that machine translation is a powerful tool for editors to improve their work. He finds it amusing when the machine tries to translate new or made-up slang. “The funniest one I’ve seen at Unbabel was an idiom that doesn’t really work in English. ‘To fart for the price’, which in Danish, means to haggle. I remember laughing out loud when I read it in English.” From experience, we know that literal translation of idioms rarely works!