What I've been reading and learning (CPD)

Maintaining language and legal skills is very important to me. As well as currently studying towards an MA in Translation Studies, I love learning new languages and improving my specialist legal and sectoral skills. Reading is a key part of this process and here's what I've enjoyed recently:

- "Les Flamboyantes" by Charlotte Monpezat. A highly personal and objective look at France's approach to women aged over fifty in the workplace and in society more generally. Sobering...

- "Goldman" by Ivan Jablonka. A sociological perspective as well as a biography of Jean-Jacques Goldman.

- "Le mage du Kremlin" by Giuliano da Emploi. Great book about power behind the scenes in Russian political circles and how oligarchy works which reads at times like a 19th century Russian novel.  

I translate both with and without the help of machine translation (MT) and neural machine translation (NMT), working mostly using Trados software as well as Phrase (Memsource) and a range of proprietary cloud and online translation platforms. I do however like to "keep my hand in" and my skills honed by translating from scratch, without help from the machines.