French and English were both my home languages growing up. I often joke that my first translation clients were my own parents! I attended school in both the UK and France throughout childhood, my academic year being split between the two school systems. This puts me in the rather rare position of not only being bilingual, but also understanding cultural references and experiences that only locals can, in two countries. And I can't help noticing a lot of translations miss the mark because of a lack of familiarity with elements of context.

I graduated in English Literature and machine translation, in France then trained as a computer programmer in order to work in the nascent field of artificial intelligence applied to natural language processing.

I thought my job offer from Lernout & Hauspie was my dream job until the UN offered an opportunity to translate for them that was impossible to turn down, effectively keeping me in the more traditional field of human translation.

In the years since, computer assisted translation has taken off and I now use a wide array of tools developed by my former classmates.