Maura Byrne
MA Translation and Interpreting Studies (MATIS)
What was your background before choosing to do an MA in Translation and Interpreting Studies?
Before starting the MA in Translation and Interpreting Studies at Manchester I had studied for a BA in Spanish and French at Trinity College, Dublin. During my undergraduate degree, I knew that I wanted to pursue a career in translation and felt that a Master's in Translation and Interpreting studies would be the right path to choose. I did, however, spend some time teaching English in Spain before deciding that the time was right to start the MA at Manchester.
What aspects of the MA or of your time in Manchester did you most enjoy?
I am from Manchester, although my main reason for choosing to return home was the MA course offered by the Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies (CTIS) and the fact that it was part of the EMT network. I cannot recommend the MA highly enough; it is a very challenging but highly rewarding course and it gave me the chance to learn about and gain practical experience in different areas of translation and interpreting, such as subtitling and consecutive interpreting. The teaching staff on the MA course are fantastic; they are experts in their fields and were all very approachable and offered excellent guidance and help whenever it was needed.
What have you done since graduating from the MA?
After graduating from the MA course, I returned to Spain to teach English at the British Council while I worked to establish myself as a translator. I was very lucky to spend two months as an English translation intern at the English Translation Service at the United Nations, New York. The knowledge that I had acquired on the translation for international organisations course on the MA was a great help to me when it came to translating documents on a wide range of UN issues. After returning to Spain after my internship, I started to work as a freelance translator until moving to Luxembourg in October 2012 for a six-month translation traineeship at the European Parliament. I am still based in Luxembourg, where I work as a full-time freelance translator and mainly specialise in legal translation and EU and international affairs, although I also translate a lot of marketing-related texts, particularly for the cosmetics industry.
What are the main or most interesting elements of your current job?
The most interesting part of my job is the variety of projects that I receive; every day is different and I learn about new topics all the time. I would still love to work as a translator in an international organisation in the future, but for now I am concentrating on developing as a freelance translator.