and, to begin at the beginning ...
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. Join the army and learn a trade? Well, ... sort of.
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, the organisation of which was largely assigned
to our headquarters, the regiment decided that it would
prove to the world it had no problems with language barriers.
In 1975 there certainly weren't many bilingual soldiers in the Italian
Alpine Corps and there 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, one day I was suddenly 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.
In any case it was safer than being assigned to anti-terrorism activities and
doing guard shifts and I definitely preferred it to certain dreaded 'fatigue duties'.
For a brief period, my cosmopolitan friends and I formed a corps of our own
and enjoyed our status as army translators. Yes, we were pleased with our unexpected 'promotion'.
During the evenings, the local people of Bassano del Grappa that we came into contact with
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. For them it was just something out of the ordinary.
For the British-born, Austrian-born and Belgian-born conscripts and temporary
members of our tiny 'translator corps' everything was out of the ordinary.