Hello everyone!

This is my first post, so I wanted to start with something personal and that could make me connect with you. I would like to get to the core of what we do: why did we decide to be translators?

I think that being a translator is not just a job that you leave in the office after your shift is over, but a vocation, a passion, a way of life.

I’ve wanted to be a translator since I was little.

At the time I thought translators only worked with novels, and that suited me perfectly as I had an obsessive love for books! This is mostly thanks to my parents and their big library: I loved looking at the books, touching their backs, opening them to smell the paper and, supreme delight!, get carried away by the stories.

I learned how to read before going to school because I couldn’t stand not being able to do it while everybody else could – in fact, I was basically surrounded by adults: I was an only child at the time and my parents didn’t have friends with kids my age, plus I had no cousins. Even before that, though, I would learn by heart the words on every page of a book so that I could recite it aloud and turn the page at the right time. I know, it’s creepy. I once scared an old lady at the doctor’s waiting room. I don’t think my mother was very happy about it.

Anyway, the love for books alone probably wouldn’t have been enough for me to want to start this career. Two were two main facts that defined my decision:

1. I’ve been exposed since an early age to foreign languages. My mother studied German and French and my aunt studied to be a linguistic mediator for German, and both of them worked with languages.

2. My best friend’s family had to move to Boston, USA, where they lived for 7 years and only came back to Italy for the summer holidays. English would be widely spoken, mainly because my friend and her sister went to primary school there and would speak English with each other – and often with me.

So, there you have it: a skinny, bespectacled little girl with always a book under her armpit and a know-it-all attitude who thought she had it all figured out, which high school, which university, which languages, which line of work… Then things happened a bit differently, but that’s another story!

Now, enough about me! I would like your comments: what does it mean for you to be a translator? When and how did you decide to become one? Was it a sudden realization, a long and thought-through process, something you’ve known all your life or that you’re still trying to figure out?

Cheers!