Everything started on my first year of primary school, it was the first time we would be studying English at school. Many of my classmates already knew some English, as they attended a language academy as an extracurricular activity. I was also doing some extracurricular activities as I was attending the music school with a friend.
As the year went on, I realised that during English class, some of those classmates (specially my best friend) understood almost everything that the teacher taught, however, most of the words she was teaching us were new for me and even if at the time I didn’t want to admit it… I was jealous.
Still, I continued attending music school some more years, as I liked it, and I was pretty good at it. Then it came the time when I had to choose an instrument to focus on, and I chose the piano. This year was decisive for me, the piano instructor was not really interested in teaching and my classmates were usually picking on me as I was the youngest in the class. Who could have expected it? Every single evening that I had piano lessons, I was feeling unwell. My parents noticed that something wasn’t right and made the decision that I should drop my music lessons and pick another extracurricular activity. Hence, I decided I wanted to learn English at a language academy, and bingo! I never felt unwell again because of my extracurricular activity.
From that moment, my destiny changed. The teachers at the academy were really professional, classmates were nice with me, and what’s more, I could understand what my English teacher at school was saying. I kept studying English at the academy until I started my A Levels as I had to focus more on my studies and couldn’t spend as much time as needed studying English. This was a really tough decision for me!
One of the things I loved about studying English was that I was able to translate English song lyrics – I reckon I’m not the only translator that did that when younger – this way I could understand better what my favourite songs were about. In fact, during secondary school we had an assignment in which we had to choose a song, and then we had to analyse it, the song could either be in Spanish or in English, however, if it was in English, we had to translate it. So I didn’t give it much thought and chose a song in English so that I had to translate the lyrics. This was the moment when I realised, I loved translating and that I wanted to become a professional translator.