Lisa Agostini, Ellen Kenny and Marcela Sariego will share insights into their life and work as translators.

The Spanish Network is starting 2021 full of hope with a new panel webinar in which you will be able to ask any questions you may have about translation.

Our three panellists come from very different backgrounds but all share a passion for communication. They will tell us about their own route into translation from publishing, journalism and the law and how their backgrounds have instructed their freelancing lives.

Join us at 10 am on the 25th January for what will surely be a very lively debate and bring all those burning questions with you.

Anyone with an interest in translation and/or whose working languages are Spanish and English, in either direction, is welcome to join us.

This event is free to network members and £10 for everyone else.

Lisa Agostini

Born in London to Welsh and Trinidadian parents, Lisa grew up in Belgium and Venezuela where she attended the French Lycée. She has a languages degree from the University of Southampton, a postgraduate diploma in publishing studies from the London College of Printing and a master’s degree in technical and specialised translation from the University of Westminster. She has been a UK-based translator and editor for 20 years with previous career stints at MTV, BBC, NHS and primarily academic publishing for 8 years. She works from French, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian into English in the medical, pharmaceutical and humanities fields, and is the Coordinator of the ITI Spanish Network.

Marcela Sariego

Marcela initially studied journalism, but life led her to the fascinating world of translation, where she has been able to combine her passions for language, writing and global development, which is the field she now specialises in. She started translating professionally for several London local authorities until all of their language services were phased out, around 2010. Since then, she mainly works with international NGOs with programmes in Latin America. She was born and raised in Chile, but has lived most of her life abroad. She has a degree in Journalism from Universidad Complutense de Madrid and a CIoL Diploma in Translation. When Marcela is not translating, she is dancing Zumba, Covid-restrictions permitting.

Ellen Kenny

Ellen did French and Spanish at university and then spent a few years in Portugal and Spain, doing various things which included some translation and interpreting. She then returned to the UK and qualified as a solicitor in 1993, training with Westminster firm Lewis Silkin. She came to translation accidentally, mainly as a way out of the rat race of inflexible full-time work, and has worked freelance since 1997, apart from a mid-life gap year in 2005 when she made a bid to become a human rights lawyer in Guatemala. She does almost exclusively legal translation, although has been known to translate poetry for herself. For many years now her main clients have been EU institutions, so things are going to have to change.