Having undertaken translation work intermittently for well over 20 years, due to my fluency in other languages, it was finally made official in 2023 with the CIOL DipTrans qualification. In 2024 I attended both Bristol Translates and the BCLT summer school, as well as completing various editing and proofreading courses with the CIEP. Alongside remunerated translation work, I undertake well over 100 hours of CPD every year, including regular language tutoring sessions to ensure all my languages are maintained, translation-related courses and webinars, and networking activities with colleagues in the industry. I have been mentored for medical translation in all four languages by experienced medical translators.

I am an Associate Member of the ITI and a full member of the CIOL. My specialisms are:

• Medical translation
• General translation (personal documents, websites etc)
• Real estate translation

My other translation interests are:

• Ecology and Conservation (I am available for some charitable pro bono work in this area)
• Literary translation

Here is my story:

Having been an unremarkable language student during my school years, my true linguistic journey began in 1995 at the age of eighteen upon moving to Mallorca, Spain. Within three months my Spanish was verging on fluent – I had at last discovered a strength.

Mallorca led to Granada, then Barcelona and then Marbella. During my 8 years in Spain, I worked in the hospitality industry, in the marketing departments of various real estate companies and as a self-employed English teacher and translator. Along the way I gained a TESOL qualification (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages), an IT administration qualification (Administrativo Informático) and passed the DELE exam (Diploma de Español como Lengua Extranjera).

At the end of 2003 I moved to France, and began by getting my schoolgirl French up to speed at the Alliance Française in Montpellier. The remaining 5 years in France were spent in a little village close to the Italian border, from where I was able to commute to Monaco to work in the Spanish and English departments of a yacht insurance company. I continued to translate on a freelance basis, as and when requests came my way.

In 2010 I moved to the Liguria region of Italy, close to the town of Sanremo. I was already fairly conversant in Italian: living so close to the border and working alongside Italians in Monaco meant I acquired a basic level by osmosis, a short language course in Bologna in 2009 filled in the gaps. A brief stint working for a company that offered English-language summer schools to Italian children was followed by a couple of years running a small gift shop in the village I lived in, while translating and interpreting for non-Italian second home owners trying to navigate their way around property renovations and Italian bureaucracy.

By this time I had met my Romanian husband-to-be, and was beginning to add a fourth Romance language to my collection. After the birth of our daughter, I started dedicating all my work time to translation, both independently (which once astonishingly led to my translating a book on Shamanism from French) as well as in collaboration with a local real estate company and notary.

After twenty-two years in mainland Europe, I eventually returned to the UK with Romanian husband and tri-lingual child in tow. Having got my husband’s home improvement business established and my daughter settled into the British school system, my thoughts turned to my own professional future. While in Italy I had taken courses in creative writing and journalism, as well as writing articles for a currency exchange company and maintaining a personal blog. My interests have long lain with languages and language creation, and a career in translation allows me to indulge both.