Born in Virginia, USA, but raised in Hampshire, in the south of England, it was at a very early age that I discovered my passion for languages. First came Latin and French, until I had my first beginner-level Spanish lesson at the age of 13, only to be told by my teacher, eight lessons later, that he felt he couldn't teach me anything else because I knew everything. So, I moved one door down into the advanced level, with students who had been studying it for three years and yet seemed to know less than I did.

Nine years later, in June 1984, I graduated in Modern Iberian Languages from University College London, and that August I moved to Spain, where I have now been happily and firmly established for 40-plus years.
I spent the first two years teaching English as a foreign language in a private academy. Yet that gave me little opportunity to practice and improve my Spanish, so I slowly ventured into the world of translation, taking my first steps as a professional translator, until a time came when I made up my mind that translation was my true calling.

In my professional career spanning 38+ years, I've gone from having to type out my translations on a typewriter, huddled in the corner of the academy secretary's office, to slogging away at a portable IBM computer with its tiny built-in screen, floppy disks and MS-DOS; then came bigger and faster PCs, WordPerfect (now sorely missed) and the advent of the fax, dial-up modems, courier services and Word, all of which seemed a godsend. Now, nearly four decades on, the message going around seems to be that human translation is a thing of the past, and its machine counterpart is the solution. Hence, one acronym is replaced by another: in the 1990s, the buzzword was CAT (computer-assisted translation), tools specifically developed and designed to assist human translators, whereas now it is MTPE (machine translation post-editing) and AI. Well yes, Artificial Intelligence and apps like ChatGPT do translate fast and cheaply, but as ChatGPT itself responded to me, only the human eye guarantees accuracy, nuances and naturalness. Without a professional translator, words can lose their essence, and your message can lose its impact.