Hi!
I’m Lauren, a freelance translator and tutor from Manchester, UK.
After graduating with a Master’s Degree in translation in 2023, I became a freelancer, offering Spanish, Italian, and French to English translation services and GCSE and A-Level Spanish and French private tuition, all to help people traverse linguistic barriers and communicate across cultures.
My Story
Before I became a translator, my first passion was language learning. I started learning both Spanish and French in my first year of high school, and both instantly became my favourite subjects. Noone else in my family is bilingual, so I can’t really explain what attracted me to language learning, but I guess that it was at least in part because of my passion for travel and the fact that I could see a very real use for the skills I was developing in class.
I remember the first time I went to Spain after starting to learn Spanish and trying to converse with the staff at the hotel I was staying at. Of course, I couldn’t say much with only 6 months of learning under my belt, but I tried and felt proud of myself for doing so.
I enjoyed and excelled at learning languages throughout high school so, when it came to choose what to study at A-Level, Spanish and French were obvious choices. Although I enjoyed both languages, Spanish has always been my favourite, perhaps because Spain is my favourite country in the world to visit. Anyway, this is why I chose to study Spanish as the main component of my degree at Manchester Metropolitan University. At university, I also decided to challenge myself to learn another language: Italian.
To be honest, when I chose to study Spanish at university, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do with my life. All I knew is that I wanted to do something with languages. It was in my second year when I first experienced the world of translation beyond the basic word-for-word exercises we often did in language class. As I had years before with language learning, I instantly loved translation and looked forward to that class more than any other. I don’t think I ever realised just how many decisions go into a translation before, and I loved the problem-solving elements of the profession, as well as diving into the theory behind it.
So, that was when my path for the future was set. After graduating in 2022, I immediately enrolled on a Master’s course in translation at the nearby University of Manchester, where I developed my translation skills further, learning how to adapt my skills to a variety of different specialisations, including my chosen specialisation, tourism translation.
After graduating in 2023, I got to work on becoming a freelancer, setting up this website and applying for as many translation jobs as possible. I’m not going to say that it has been an easy first year-and-a-half in this industry, but it feels like an achievement to be able to say that I am a professional translator and that people pay me for the words I write.