Why I Am a Translator
From loving foreign languages to becoming a professional
I have always been fascinated by foreign languages. I remember the first time I became aware of their existence. It was 1980, I was five years old and I was on holiday with my parents in the Aosta Valley.
At the time, the only languages I knew were Italian and Sardinian, even though I had never thought about the fact that they were two separate languages. I spoke only Italian with my parents, apart from a few words or idiomatic expressions in Sardinian here and there, because my father is not Sardinian, but all my relatives also usually spoke Sardinian (more specifically a dialect of the Campidanese variant of Sardinian). They switched from one language to another easily. I listened to them and understood them anyway. But my knowledge of whether there were multiple languages ended there.
That day in the summer of 1980, I was on a swing in a playground in Courmayeur. Another little girl approached me and talked to me, but I couldn’t understand what she said. I smiled, I nodded, I said yes, but in reality I didn’t understand anything. She repeated, but nothing, I couldn’t understand. I was also a little embarrassed. Then my mother came up to me and told me she was asking me what my name was. The little girl was saying, “Comment t’appelle tu?” Oh yes, she was…
