Between Theory and Practice
After gaining my CELTA certificate in 1997, I began my career as a teacher of English as a foreign language. I worked with toddlers, children, teenagers and adults, who were learning English for fun, work or school. I prepared my pupils for everything from end-of-year performances to exams, taught them grammar rules, encouraged them to express themselves and corrected their mistakes. It taught me the common mistakes made by Italian speakers and gave me the opportunity to learn specialist terminology too. These experiences formed a base that still serves me in my work, day in day out.
These days my involvement in AITI, the Italian Association of Translators and Interpreters, sees me taking part in organizing training courses for my colleagues in Tuscany and throughout Italy, covering all our various continuing professional development needs.
I put all of this experience to use when translating texts written by scholars of education – including professor Vanna Boffo, current director of the Department of Education, Languages, Interculture, Literature and Psychology at the University of Florence, whose main research interest is the education-to-work transition, an area of vital importance for young people today. Here are a couple of examples of articles that I have translated:
- Vanna Boffo and Fabio Togni, “Entrepreneurial Organization in Higher Education. Professional and Educational Answers to the Crisis (The Pandemic and More)”, Andragoške Studije, I, 2021, pp. 21–40 (doi).
- Vanna Boffo, “Storytelling and Other Skills: Building Employability in Higher Education”, in Regina Egetenmeyer, Vanna Boffo and Stefanie Kröner, International and Comparative Studies in Adult and Continuing Education, pp. 31–50, Firenze University Press, Florence 2020 (downloadable).
