To be translator, you need to have a love of language, books and reading. I inherited a love of books from my grandmother, who used to buy all the prize-winning French books published, so I was lucky to have the chance to read extensively from an early age. This definitely helped me to develop an excellent technical grasp of my first language, French. I loved reading so much that my mother quite often caught me reading under the bedclothes at night when I was supposed to have gone to sleep!

Another important feature of my early family life was that my father was a pilot in the French Air Force. This meant that from an early age I lived a somewhat nomadic lifestyle as my mother, sister and I followed him around the countries in which he was stationed (we visited a lot of war zones!). In Algeria, where I lived for three years, I went to school with local children.

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