I’ve loved languages for as long as I can remember. After graduating in French, German and a little Swedish, I worked in the UK office of a big French toy company, and I loved the occasional translation work that came my way. Assembly instructions, marketing materials, order/delivery/accounts problems, quality assurance issues… I dealt with them all.

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After a few years as a full-time mum, I completed an MA in Translation at the University of Bristol. I loved almost every minute and it went really well: I ended up with a distinction. For the last year and a half I've been doing some fabulous freelance work, translating blogs and literature for shoe companies, both from German and from French, and among plenty of other things, a thermal resort website, when I found out that writing about massages is almost as relaxing as having one! In my spare time I’ve been doing plenty of volunteer translation, mostly for an amazing French charity who help out the most vulnerable people in countries all over the world. I’ve done plenty of technical translations for them, as well as some articles for their website. You can see some examples of my work here:

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'La Chronique' - the charity's quarterly magazine

Field coordinator: a varied and challenging job

For a doctor in southern Iraq, no two days are the same

‘In Cameroon, the teams told me how they cleared paths with machetes'

Taking action to fight whooping cough in a Seine-Saint-Denis slum settlement

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I've also harboured a burning desire to branch into literary translation too, and recently this dream has been coming to fruition very nicely, thank you! My first full-length work, Marzahn, Mon Amour by Katja Oskamp is due to be published by Peirene Press in February 2022: it's a beautiful book full of empathy and it's an utter privilege to have the chance to work so closely on a book I love. I've also been shortlisted for the 2020 Austrian Cultural Forum London Translation Prize and for the 2019 John Dryden Translation Competition.

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I have a passion for food and a vast collection of French, German and Swedish cookbooks and cookery magazines, and I often get confused when I realise other people can’t read the recipe I’m following.

 

My other half complains about my large pile of French, German, even Dutch magazines about art, needlework, dressmaking, embroidery and patchwork. As a result of it though, I have some rather eclectic vocabulary hidden away in my head; how many people do you know who are aware that a patchwork template is a ‘gabarit’ in French?

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When I’m not lost in translation, I enjoy photography (another specialism of mine), and I occasionally take part in exhibitions with my framed textile art.