This will be my fourth ITI Conference (if you count attending just the Masterclass Day in 2013) and the more I hear about what’s in store in Newcastle in April, the more excited I get! I can’t wait to meet faces familiar and not-so-familiar when it all gets underway in just a few weeks’ time, and I’m also looking forward to some of the ‘fringe’ events such as the Singing Translators and getting to know the city and surrounding area better.

Having cut my professional translator’s teeth working for a London agency in the early 1990s, I packed in my London-commuter existence and packed my bags for the Alps, where I worked as a ski rep for two winter seasons, with summer stints as an area manager in France for up-market tour operator Headwater Holidays. Headwater offered me a ‘proper job’ as Product Development Manager and for a few years I enjoyed my ‘dream job’, creating new cycling, skiing and walking holidays all over Western Europe, from the product research and design stage right through to supplier contracting, operations planning, travel photography and brochure copywriting. However, I missed the intellectual challenge of translation and in 1998 switched back, returning to the French Alps and setting myself up as a freelance translator specialising in tourism and travel, working from French and occasionally German. Fast forward to 2015, and I’m left wondering what happened to all the years in between… But as a keen mountain walker, skier, mountain biker and runner, I am happy to have found my natural niche.

The other me is dedicated to South Cheshire’s thriving amateur theatre scene, where I regularly appear on stage at the Nantwich Players Theatre and the Harlequin Theatre in Northwich. I have recently come across a contemporary French playwright with a talent for revealing the absurd in the day-to-day existence of modern life and have found a new goal in the idea of bringing his work to the attention of English-speaking audiences. However, securing the translation rights is another matter…