“Who are you?” asked me, a slightly tipsy lady.It was autumn of 2004, I was standing behind a bar in a medieval castle turned into a popular hotel in Sussex. It was my first stable job since my arrival in the UK.“I am a bartender ma’am,” I even had a certificate of my 6-week-long bartending […]

We have so much in common! I try to keep up with the news, at least in a few areas.One reflection that accompanies reading or watching the news these days is that since the fall of the Wall, plenty of new ones, both physical and intangible, have been created between various peoples. It is so

CERTIFIED TRANSLATION  One of the questions I hear most often is if I am a sworn translator. This question is not surprising when we consider that I translate into Polish and Poland, just like Germany or France has a system of sworn translators and the much coveted status of a sworn translator is a pinnacle

or we are interconnected much closer than we think Most of us would agree that the main role of translators is to help in communication. It has been so for millennia. So much so that frequently we are unaware of how much of our current store of knowledge we owe to translators. I remember how

In the People’s Republic of Poland (PRL), physical goods were rare and difficult to come by, and when they were available, the quality was low. Frequently, when people were looking for something durable, they would use something “poniemieckie” (ex-German/post-German or “postdeutsch” in German). Even in my youth in the eighties, more than 40 years after

The Only Successful Uprising in Polish History Poland’s history is a fascinating tapestry shaped by its people, culture, and language. As a Polish translator, I often analyze these cultural nuances, which also inform my work in Polish translation. There are some historic circumstances which fundamentally influenced development of Poland and its people. Among the many

The role of translator involves much more than just replacing words in one language with the same text in another one. It inextricably involves shifting between various cultures, in a way every good translator is an intercultural negotiator. My knowledge of the Polish culture results partly from my childhood and education spent in socialist Poland.

For the first time in more than a decade I will not be making any resolutions for 2025. Year after year, in the last days of December I spent some time at what at best could be called focusing on my future, but more realistically could be called wishful thinking. Usually these resolutions revolved about

Over the years, I’ve had several websites for my professional work. There was a time, more than a decade ago, when I took real pride in them, meticulously analyzing stats and tweaking content. Somewhere along the way, I got complacent. I relied on my profiles at ProZ.com and LinkedIn, stopped maintaining or promoting my website,

The old lamp radio emitted crackling sounds. The voice of Free Europe’s speaker reached us, accompanied by static and disturbances—some allegedly intentionally generated by the PRL authorities. On the upside, the old farmhouse in rural Poland where I spent my summers was so far removed from neighbors that we didn’t need to lower the volume.