I am an English native speaker and a graduate in German and Spanish from the University of Southampton. I have lived in Germany and Spain and have spent prolonged periods abroad. I am resident in East London, and spent almost twenty years working in construction in the U.K. Prior to this I worked as a freelance translator, an occupation to which I have returned, which for me is the indulgence of a life long love. My spheres of interest are literary and creative ,with specialist knowledge of ceramics and construction terminology, with a wide understanding of legal and academic terminology and a flair for tourism literature and abstract ideas and concepts.
I am not only fascinated by what languages are, but also by what they have the potential to become, and the older I get the more their subtleties reveal themselves to me, which are exactly the qualities I try to capture and convey in my translation work.
To me a translator is someone who creates a parallel document. He takes a text in one language and converts it into another. With language knowledge and painstaking attention to detail, allied to flair and imagination he creates a second document which stands alone, without the need for cross-referencing.