Fast facts about me:

• 300 words per hour
• Able to put 10+ hours a day in a job
• I answer emails right away if I'm not in class (teaching 10h/week currently)
• 2 Complete books translated from English to Portuguese
• a 3rd one is on the way (probono)
• 2 chapters of a Conversational Logic book (on hold due to cancellation)
• Several Social Sciences paper and thesis abstracts translated from Portuguese to English
• Some probono translations about Buddhism, English to Portuguese
• Did translations for fun and to help since 2005
• 10 years teaching English to native Brazilian Portuguese speakers
• Former computer technician. Software and security protocols are easy for me

My professional life in a nutshell

I started translating when I was a teenager, for fun and to help other people that were connected to my interests and hobbies. Some minor jobs popped up until I ended up translating two full books. I will tell my background and how I became the kind of translator I am today, fully engaged, passionate yet pragmatic.

My somewhat polymath teenager years

I have been involved with English and Portuguese languages my whole life. The latter is my Native language and the former I started learning by myself when I was 10 years old because I wanted to understand the stories of the video games I was playing. At 15, like lots of other teenagers, I wanted to be a hacker, just to be famous among my local friends. For this purpose, I read lots of Computer, Programming and Computer Network articles, websites and some books. Meanwhile, I did my high school in a special Brazilian program which, besides the regular subjects, also had lots of Social Science and Educational classes to turn me into an Elementary School teacher. This is called "magistério" here.

Getting serious - Being a Sociolinguists researcher

My decision for my college degree kept me on a consistent track. It was a double major in Portuguese and English languages. During my college years, I worked as a junior researcher in a Sociolinguistic Science Project named "Atlas Linguistico do Brasil", which aim has been to map linguistic variations of Portuguese Language throughout the whole Brazilian territory. Those variations are of phonetical, semantical, lexical and grammatical natures. As a junior researcher, I traveled along my seniors to interview Brazilian people, then bring back to our language lab those recordings and transcribe them for further use.

Computers come to the stage

This project required also somebody who could handle the computers, the software and the network to keep the lab working. Because of my amateur background, I started taking care of those computers in a spirit of goodwill but I got more and more interested in that and I ended working for an IT company for 2 years. There I learned a bit more about Programing Languages.

Giving back what I got

Due to illness in family, I moved to a new city and there I started working as an English teacher. In this period I taught for private students, in language schools, a regular middle-school and nowadays I teach in companies. Two of these companies are fintech, and the other one is a software house. I have been applying everything I learned in sociolinguists, mostly language variation, generative grammar, the no-mistake approach and others in my classes.

I turned into a Martial Artist

Also, in this city, I started a martial arts called Aikido in the first year, and recently I became a Yoga practitioner. I have been practicing them until today and I say happily and proudly that these philosophies changed my whole self - I got healthier, more organized, patient and motivated. I'll get my black belt in 1 or 2 years if things keep going the way they have been.

Meanwhile, I have always been a translator

I did my translation jobs In parallel with all that. As a teenager, I translated RPG articles for a Dungeons and Dragons forum that I used to be a member. In college, I translated software manuals for the use of my lab peers. After I started Aikido, I translated articles about Buddhism for a website, and a whole book explaining what Aikido is to beginners.

Because of my close contact with people from Social Sciences (Anthropology, Social Science and Politics) since my first years in college, I translated and proofread many abstracts, papers and a full doctorate thesis about Climate Change Crisis in Argentina.

Finally, when I realized that I really should become a full-time translator, I decided to translate, without anybody asking, a complete fiction book, full of jokes, from English to Portuguese. The book, from the acclaimed British comedy fiction writer Terry Pratchet, is called "Soul Music", which I named in Portuguese as "Sou Música". This is today my proudest work, and the one that challenged me the most, for translating jokes is pretty hard.