Hello!

I was born in 1986 in a literary translator and writer family. As the cliché goes, translation and languages are “in my blood” – I was raised with Bulgarian, English and Spanish lullabies and the rattling sound of a typewriter. I started studying English in kindergarten before I can even remember, as early as 3 years old – in 1989. That same year Communism came crashing down in Bulgaria, and American popular culture slowly, but surely pervaded our country. So, as kids, we would listen to more and more music in English, watch movies in English, play video games in English. Even all kinds of computer/TV/appliance/phone/other menus, guides and manuals were in English. This type of “learn quickly or stay in the past” environment (combined with some private lessons) really helped boost my English language skills.

This, together with my early interest in the rattling typewriter (and subsequently, a primitive early 90’s PC), led me to follow in my mother’s footsteps in a publishing house. Almost for fun, I started working as a translator in 1999, ten years after I had started studying English. That same year I enrolled in an English-only school, which is considered by many to be one of the best private high schools on the Balkans. My first translated book, a novel by Tom Clancy, was published when I was 14. That was back in 9th grade, and truth be told, I haven’t stopped working, studying, playing and living with English and Bulgarian ever since.

I may have started off as a translator, but my 20 years of freelancing so far have taught me a wide variety of other skills. Today, I can confidently say that I am also an experienced editor, copywriter, subtitler, interpreter, proofreader, linguistic consultant, project bidder, client relations manager, master email juggler, self-taught software fixer, personal accounting veteran, lightning-speed typist, world-class Google researcher, and a bunch of other, less impressive skills, like green tea binge drinker, human time-zone calculator, and walking thesaurus.

I am always looking into ways to optimize and streamline my work process through software, hardware and brainpower, so my work capacity is larger than usual. I love communicating with representatives of various countries and cultures, and the Internet has rendered geographical distances obsolete, so I’ve worked for countries all over the six inhabited continents. Should anyone in the Antarctic need translation into Bulgarian, please give me a shout out and help me tick the last continent off my list! 🙂