Hi everyone,
My name is Christophe Valensi, I am 22 years old, and I live in Toulon, on the French riviera. I have recently joined the Web-Translations team for a three-months long internship.
When I was a young boy, I wanted to be a lawyer (I still don’t know why I didn’t want to be an astronaut like anyone else…). My passion for languages and translation has started when I was 9 years old, during a family trip in Namibia, an African country at the border of South Africa. I was a young boy, and I didn’t know a word of English, so I had to improvise in order to be understood by the locals (in Namibia, the official languages are English, German and Afrikaans). That’s how I realised learning foreign languages was very important if I wanted to travel later in my life.
After a second trip in Namibia a year later, I decided to join the European section of my college, a section in which there were more language courses. Thanks to this section, I have met several bilingual students that helped me improve my English, and I have travelled twice to the United Kingdom, visiting London, Oxford, Cambridge, and Brighton! These trips made me feel more confident that I wanted to be a translator, or at least work in a place where talking different languages would be important.
After obtaining my baccalaureate thanks to my high grades in English and Spanish, I integrated the Foreign Languages Applied to Business licence degree at the University of Toulon. During this degree, I started my first translation courses in English and Spanish (both theme and version), and I particularly enjoyed these! I also started learning Italian, and now I believe I understand Italian, even though I still can’t speak it very well. Of course, my licence degree was marked by the Covid crisis, I was supposed to do a foreign internship, but it was cancelled and instead we had to imagine we were the owner of a company that we wanted to set up in a foreign country (I chose my mom’s company and decided we would work in New York).
Once I graduated from this licence degree in 2021, I have started a master’s degree in Information Processing, Linguistics and Translation (IPLT), still at the University of Toulon. I am currently in the second year of this master’s degree and this internship is my last step before graduating from it!
When I’m not studying, I practice my English as well as my Spanish and my Italian thanks to my other passions, which are sports, video games and cinema. I also like listening to English songs and trying to translate them as accurately as possible.
During this internship, I intend to discover how a translation agency works, as it is my very first experience in such a company, and I am sure I will like it! I also look forward to learning new softwares and improving in those I already know (Trados particularly).
I am more than happy and excited to start this new adventure at Web-Translations!
30 May 2023 13:47