Hello, for today's video, I wanted to give a brief story about me, a brief story, basically my history. I wanted to talk about where I came from and how I ended up where I am, how I ended up as a translator, as a freelance translator, just so you can get an idea, get some context, and maybe you can relate to it or maybe not, but I thought it would be interesting to share that and to share who I am and where I come from. Just in case you've been watching my videos and you're wondering who is this guy talking to me through YouTube. It's pretty confusing, but we'll try to take it step by step. I was born in the States, my father's American, my mother's Italian. I was born in New York. Growing up was always sort of bilingual. We moved around quite a bit while I was young and then we ended up, I think, when I was, I guess 10 years old, a bit earlier. Anyway, we ended up in Switzerland, then we ended up in the Italian part of Switzerland when I was about 12. Before that, we were in the States and then the German part of Switzerland. Then when I was 12, I started and all during that time, I went to English school, English language school. I went to American and then in British school. But starting at 12, I went to an Italian school as well. I was always bilingual at home and then I had a bilingual education from then until high school, I finished off my high school. Actually, yeah, I shouldn't say high school. The last two years of high school, I did them in English. It was an international school close to where I lived. After this, I went to college in the States and then I came back to the Italian part of Switzerland, Dugano, to work at UBS at a bank, the Swiss bank. After this, I worked in market research. This was in English. Then I went to a grad school. Then I went into business with a buddy of mine. We went into commercial real estate. This brings me up closer to the present, but you'll notice something missing from all of this. That's translation. Up until now, I had not worked in translation. What I had done was I realized this pretty quickly when I was in college that anytime I wanted an extra cash, I found myself doing translations. At the beginning, I was teaching English. In fact, I was two, sorry, I was tutoring Italian. I was teaching English earlier and then I was tutoring Italian in college. I was doing this for money. Later, I started doing translations just because I found that I was pretty good at them. At the beginning, I was helping out friends and friends of friends. Both in college. Later, when I was working, then later, when I was in grad school, definitely because I needed a lot of money. I knew even later because I was going into business with myself. Me and my buddy, like my friend, we were just trying to set up a business so we weren't making much, definitely not at the beginning. I realized, hey, I always kind of reverbed back to translation. Every time I need extra money, why not try to make this how I make my money? And so, I decided to take it more seriously and try to enter the translation world and realized how little I actually knew. This is where I picked up all this stuff that I've been talking about in my videos, basically. So a lot of the entrepreneurial stuff has started already when I went into business with my friend. There, I got, I guess the entrepreneurial aspect, but everything dealing with translation per se has been since then. I grew up bilingual, but not as a translator. And anyone who's a translator can tell you there's a big difference between being bilingual and translator. Now, I did have experience translating because I'd done it for friends and friends of friends, like I said, and some other people I'd gotten paid and whatnot back in school. But it was only later that I really kind of learned and taught myself how to be a real translator. There were a lot of missteps that I took. A lot of wrong steps, a lot of wrong turns, which is actually why I make these videos. And also why I created my course and wrote my book is because it seemed ridiculous that there wasn't something out there teaching people how to do this stuff, right? Because when you're a freelance translator, it's very different from being a translator in a firm. And it's very different from, well, I mean, pretty much anything else out there, because you are freelancer, but you're freelancer dealing with two different languages, which very often means two different countries. I basically taught myself, so I don't have a degree in translation. You don't need a degree in translation. I'm sure it helps for a lot of the technical stuff that I had to figure out on my own. But then again, I concentrate on certain aspects of translation that I know. I worked in finance. I worked in a bank when I was there. I had to deal with all the translating back and forth because where I was, everyone spoke Italian, and I was one of the only ones to spoke English, the only one who spoke it fluently. So it was up to me to translate all our financial statements and do everything deal with the clients who spoke English and all that good stuff. So I did have a lot of experience in that context. And I was able to transpose this into translation. However, there was a lot that I still had to learn, but most of what I had to learn, I found at that point, was how to be a freelance translator, rather than working at a firm, how to get business for myself, how to make sure I maintain a certain standard of translation and what that standard should be and how to maintain it. All this stuff, which was all new to me. That's how I started translating. I definitely had some ups and downs, some fits and starts because I made some mistakes. I also didn't know what I was doing. So I didn't know how to chase new translations, new business, new clients and stuff like that. And I had to learn, I'm still learning, you know, and that's how it goes. Where I am now is I am a translator, but I've also been expanding and trying to work with other translators to set up this agency. And that's kind of what I'm trying to grow more while still being a translator. I'm figuring that out as I go along as well. I was thinking of doing some videos about that, but I feel like I'm, I mean, it actually might be interesting just to catalog my journey about that, but I feel like I'm still learning, so I don't really know what to say or what advice to give for that. But for translation, now it's been quite a few years that I've been doing it. So now I'm showing my age, pretty old. I think I'm older than I look. Anyway, I've been translating over 10 years now. And so I kind of know the ropes, especially for the types of translations that I'm doing. So anyway, that's pretty much it. That's my journey. And that's how I came from being someone who didn't do translations to someone who does do translations. Once again, my background was growing up bilingual. I realized not all of you have that many of you study a language that doesn't change much. In fact, it helps a lot with the theory. If you had to study a new language within the context of the language, you know, before, because then you can relate one language to the other. As you can see, I started pretty late in my translation career. And also I didn't have a guide or anyone helping me out when I started, which is how most translators have been most freelance translators. It is possible. You can't figure it out. I do think these videos I'm doing. I mean, I make them to help you. So I do hope they help. You know, the main thing is it was so frustrating. Doing something completely wrong and realizing, wait, why don't we all know this is wrong? Like why isn't anyone telling us that this is wrong? Because someone should be. So I started making these videos and doing all the other stuff, you know, creating the course and everything. Because I realized that I took so many fall steps that there should be kind of a catalog of the correct steps to take. Obviously, you can't guarantee success by taking this in this step. But there are many steps that are quite obvious. You should be taking other steps that are pretty useless and you should be avoiding. Hopefully you found it interesting. That's my background. And hopefully it gives you a bit more context. So you know, you get to know me a bit better. That's it for now. I'll talk to you in the next video. Obviously, most videos I try to teach something or share what I've learned, some tips and tricks and tidbits about freelancing or freelance translation more specifically. And so please subscribe if you want more of that. And I'll talk to you in the next video. Thanks. Bye.