Maria Barbalat

“The limits of your language are the limits of your world.” 

                                                                Ludwig Wittgenstein

I was born in Moldova, a strip of land squeezed between Ukraine and Romania and historically a part of Romania. At home we used both Romanian and Russian on a daily basis. I grew up surrounded by Russian books and had access to lots of Russian TV channels. In fact, when I was a child, there were more books and TV programmes available in Russian than in Romanian. Luckily, things have changed after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, when the Romanian language regained its Latin script and the people of Moldova regained access to Romanian culture.

I attended a Russian kindergarten and a Romanian school. I completed my undergraduate and postgraduate studies in Romania. I have a Bachelor’s Degree in Public Administration, awarded in 2004 by the University of Pitesti and a Master’s Degree in Translation Studies, awarded in 2011 by the West University of Timisoara. The undergraduate course in Public Administration covered 70% legal and 30% economic subjects, hence my familiarity with these fields and my preference for legal and economic translations.

I have lived in Romania for six years, and I have been living in the United Kingdom since 2011.

I started learning English in the second grade and French in the fifth grade, and I will never truly stop learning. I have always loved learning foreign languages and have enjoyed translating ever since I can remember. Besides English and French, I also speak some Italian and German, and understand Spanish.

I translate mainly from English and French into my mother tongues, because no one can compete with a native speaker when it comes to conveying all the subtleties and intricacies of language. Into English and French I translate official documents, such as certificates, degrees, academic records, etc.

Since I started my professional life in 2005, I have worked in different sectors (hospitality, telecommunications, a diplomatic mission, online marketing research) and have held various jobs (personal assistant and interpreter, in-house translator and interpreter, executive assistant, customer support representative, hotel receptionist). All of my jobs involved extensive use of foreign languages and have been placed in multilingual and multicultural settings. In 2011, following Confucius’s wise advice, ‘Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life’, I decided to devote myself exclusively to translations and became an independent translator. Confucius was right, it has been pure enjoyment ever since!