Did I choose this profession, or was I drawn into it by a series of circumstances? I began translating from Italian into English while I was doing military service in Italy in 1975. Although I had already done a few translations for a private school in Turin in 1972, I suppose this was the point at which I was really initiated into the profession.

During an international military sports event it was decided that the Italian army would prove to the world that it had no problems with language barriers.

In 1975 there weren't many bilingual soldiers in the Italian Alpine Corps and there certainly weren't very many who had spent the first twenty years of their lives in England. In any case, I was one of them.
Together with a small group of soldiers from various units across the north of Italy who, like me, had been drafted into the Italian army on account of their dual nationality, I was therefore relieved of my duties as a radio operator and ordered to sit in front of a typewriter and translate reports, schedules, orders and a variety of texts from Italian into English.
I discovered I was good at it.

For a brief period, my cosmopolitan friends and I formed a corps of our own and enjoyed our status as army translators. However, during the evenings, the local people of Bassano must have found it very odd to hear 'Italian' soldiers speaking in a variety of languages that were certainly not Italian. It was amusing to see some of the bartenders trying to 'reframe' and make sense of it all. However, for them it was just something out of the ordinary. For the British-born, Austrian-born and Belgian-born members of our tiny 'translator corps' everything was out of the ordinary.

I've been translating from Italian into English professionally since 1986.

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