My multi-lingual upbringing, academic qualifications, publications, and experience translating and copy-editing all testify to my linguistic and writing skills. I am not only skilled in the languages from which I translate, but am also an elegant and precise writer in English.
Key facts about me:
• Of British nationality, and born and brought up in Brussels, Belgium, I am bilingual in English and French, and very advanced in Italian. The first twenty years of my life were steeped in a multi-lingual environment, giving me an enduring facility with languages.
• I have experience in legal translation; in marketing and business translation; in culinary and gastronomic translation; translating historical and archival material for scholarly publications; translating and interpreting for a consultancy on charities and taxation law, as well as for a City firm; technical translations, and a range of research involving French, Italian and German sources.
• Primary education in French, secondary education in French and English (European Baccalaureate, 87% final year mark, and 90% in Advanced English, French and Italian). I lived in Italy for a year, immersing myself in the language and culture, and attending advanced language courses at the Scuola Leonardo da Vinci in Florence.
• Further education at Cambridge and Harvard Universities, with a First Class BA in Philosophy, and an MA (with Distinction) and a PhD in the History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge University. My academic expertise is the history of medicine and psychiatry thus I am highly acquainted with current medical and psychiatric terminology, and with the style of medical and psychiatric journals and textbooks. I am also well versed in philosophy, history, sociology, and anthropology.
• A skilled writer, I have published both scholarly and general articles and books, and produced reports for very specific audiences (a pharmaceutical company, NGOs, and parliamentary groups). In many of these realms, I have made use of texts in French and Italian. I am adept at writing with particular audiences in mind, and sensitive to nuances of meaning, tone and register.
• I read and produce reports on Italian novels for a publishing company.
• I am a trained and employed copy-editor for the Studies in History and Philosophy of Science journal at Cambridge University.
• I have the linguistic precision and clarity that is vital for translating, and the eagle-eyed attention to detail necessary for producing a polished document. |