I am starting out professionally as a translator, following up a long lasting personal interest, and hope to build up my port folio, and so shall provide highly competitive rates.
Coming from a Polish background but raised in London, and passing through the French educational system up to the age of eleven, I have had a privileged insider's understanding of these languages, both read and spoken, backed up by extensive travel in both Poland and France. I learned Spanish in a similar manner, and with explicit engagement in translation as my main method of accelerating my progress. After travelling mostly alone in Cuba and Mexico with children's stories by the countries' leading writers as source material for translations into English, I took the occasion of most of my holidays from studying Philosophy to spend time in Spain, before spending a year as a teaching assistant in a secondary school in Catalonia through the Comenius Assistantship programme with the British Council. Throughout this time I continued translating works by both internationally renowned writers in Castilian Spanish, as well as translating a poem by local Catalan poet and friend Xavi Garcia, for entry into the Times Stephen Spender Poetry in Translation Competition. The translation is currently being revisited for possible publication in the forthcoming programme for the Fira de Tarrega, the international theatre festival. Through those summer holidays, I lived in Granada, also coming to know a local poet, Alfredo XXX, translating a pair of booklets of poems about the Albayzin, the historically rich neighbourhood I was staying in, and experimenting with poetry in Spanish myself.
I have also provided subtitles from English to Spanish