I like what Ben Jones says in his blog post on here. It sums up my own experience too: you can never tell what your best take-away point from a conference will be. It may be something from a presentation or it may just be a throwaway comment from a one-minute conversation you have with one of the delegates. In fact, at the ITI conference in Gatwick in 2013, it was a very brief chat I had with Ben himself that set me up for one of the most interesting and rewarding projects I worked on that year! Not that Ben had anything to do with the project as such. It was just something he said that got me thinking, which then led to my saying yes to an opportunity that came along a week later, when otherwise I would have turned it down. So, my point is, you can reap completely unexpected benefits from these conferences, and you can’t tell where they will be coming from either.

But, that aside, the provisional programme does promise plenty of fascinating and diverse talks – including quite a few unusual topics that haven’t already been covered at every other conference before. Having said that, I’ll definitely be checking out Gabriela Bocanete’s session, as I missed it at the FIT Congress last year and heard so many great things about it afterwards. Along similar lines, Sara Colombo’s work-life balance session also sounds very promising. Then there’s the panel session on co-working and the ‘Business Buddies’ case study, which I hope will inspire me to try something similar. The two sessions on budgeting and prioritising your professional spending sound like an absolute must for colleagues still subscribing to the ‘poverty cult’. In fact, anything involving Chris Durban is always worth attending! And I’m also very much looking forward to joining the ‘Singing Translators’ again.

So, having started this post somewhat back to front, here’s a little bit about me: I joined ITI as a student associate in 2001 while preparing for the IOL DipTrans, which I passed in early 2003.  I then gradually moved towards becoming a full-time freelance translator, boosted by ITI’s excellent PSG course in 2005. Until 2011, I was also working in a marketing role for a construction industry environmental assessment scheme. But for the last four years I’ve been focusing entirely on creative translation – and some copywriting. In other words, I mainly work with marketing and advertising copy, magazine articles, as well as arts catalogues, exhibition panels, events programmes and anything else that requires a more creative touch. I try as much as possible to steer clear of technical, scientific, legal or medical texts and any kind of academic writing. But, unlike many of my colleagues, I love editing.

You can chat to me on  and, of course, at the conference in Newcastle. See you there!