Jess is based in her native Buckinghamshire, having achieved First Class Honours in Spanish with management studies as an undergraduate at UCL. She explains that her interest in translation started in second year, and that she took part in Bristol Translates in 2022: “This was a great opportunity for me to develop my interest further and work collaboratively with others on Spanish translations. I also met lots of great people on the course! After the summer school, I worked hard to find some voluntary work with an Argentinian children’s author, translating some of his stories into English for him, with the help of two tutors from the summer school who proofread my translations for me.”
During her year abroad, Jess worked for a translation agency in the centre of Madrid, gaining valuable translation experience on a wide variety of texts, from legal documents to digital marketing. She says, “This helped me learn which areas of translation are best suited to me and which I would like to pursue in the future. In particular, the more creative pathways such as literature and marketing are what interests me the most because of the increased freedom in writing which comes with them.” On the MA, Jess is interested in building on an earlier research project on gender bias in machine translation, and exploring new ways of working with books and their translations.
Florian Burnat hails from France and has also spent some time in Spain. Based in the UK now, he has been working as a tax lawyer and financial consultant, two areas where he has recognised the opportunities available to interlingual professionals: “I came to see that my love of languages may lead to new prospects particularly given the need for specialised translation in the legal and financial industries.” Florian is excited about the MAT’s industry-oriented curriculum and the broad range of units on offer, from translation technologies to the ability to work on translation in movies, on TV and at the opera.
“We are very pleased to welcome both Jess and Florian,” says the MAT’s programme director Christophe Fricker. “I was on a scholarship myself when I was an MA student, so I know first-hand what difference it can make.”