A career of a lifetime
I was born in the city of Linares in Southern Spain. Since I was a child, I loved studying foreign languages at school. I began studying English at the age of 7 and French when I was 14, something fairly unusual in the 80s. I always wanted to develop a career related to foreign languages, and I ended up studying Translation and Interpreting at the renowned School of Translation of the University of Granada (UGR). There I gained access to the special Applied Languages Europe programme the UGR had in place in collaboration with the Université d’Aix-Marseille in France and the Thames Valley University, a London-based university, now called West London University. I felt privileged to join the programme as this gave me the chance to spend two university years abroad, when standard exchange programmes normally allowed to spend only one. Therefore, I spent a year in Aix-en-Provence, near the French Riviera, and another year in the Square Mile.
After my graduation in Granada, life drove me through different professional paths that I had never thought of while I was studying: I began my professional career in the world of internacional trade.
I spent six years working in the international trade department of a private company, and after that I had the chance to win a public grant for internationalisation promotion by the Agencia Andaluza de Promoción Exterior (Extenda), a public agency for internationalisation promotion in Andalusia, for a duration of two years. In the first year I worked as an intern in the Trade Mission of the Spanish Embassy in my beloved Toronto (Canada) – one of the most fascinating years of my whole life. The second year I came back to Spain, to the city of Seville, to join the International Department of the Chamber of Commerce of the city. After a few years at the Chamber coordinating its business international promotion programme in Morocco, I finally moved on to the international projects department of the Agencia de Innovación y Desarrollo de Andalucía IDEA, the regional development agency of Andalusia.
This last professional experience was the cherry of the cake of this thriving experience in international environments – trade, promotion and cooperation.
In 2015, I decided to jump into the world of independent translators, enthralling and inhospitable at the same time. From this year on, I provide language services as a professional translator under the principles of reliability and commitment to my customers. Until present this period has been full of new learning experiences by the continuing education programme I follow and the lessons learned through the professional experience itself.
I am also very proud of my past job as a lecturer at the School of Translation of the Universidad Pablo de Olavide in charge of courses including legal and economic translation, consecutive and simultaneous interpreting, and others. Furthermore, I have a collaboration in place with Translastars, a training platform for translators to be, for which I have created and coordinate two on-line courses on legal translation: EN-ES and FR-ES legal translation. Finally, I am also the creator and trainer of an on-line course called English for Logistics for Iniciativas Empresariales.
Last but not least, I cannot forget my collaborations with IdeasPropias Editorial, a publishing house for whom I have created some handbooks on business and commercial English: international trade, logistics and textile industry.