The Flemish polyglot

At the start of summer, I had this vague idea of upping my levels for Spanish and Italian. I have been knocking on the B2 door for a while now (it’s ajar already) and I thought this would be a good occasion to finally push it wide open. I knew I was going to book a package of 5 lessons with my italki tutor, but apart from that, I didn’t really have any vast plans. A little more than a week ago, I came across a language challenge on Twitter that was more or less the same as what I was going to do this week, so I thought, why not try that: study your target language for 40 hours in 7 days (credits to @languagecomeup and @seaboltspeaks). 40 hours/7 days of total Spanish immersion! What a treat! And … I had no work planned this week (but I know from experience that can change in an instant). I had initially planned to just immerse myself in Spanish as much as I could for a whole week, without a specific number of hours to reach, but then again, well, why not! Unfortunately I didn’t rea...

One of my summer goals for this year is writing a short text in all of my target languages. They are French, English, German, Danish, Spanish, Italian, Afrikaans, Luxembourgish, Bulgarian and Icelandic. First up is Spanish ! Second blog is Afrikaans , which was quite difficult (more than I had expected). The third blog I wrote, is in Luxembourgish , a language I really love. The text itself is not really long, mainly because I have no inspiration, I don't know what to write about and everything I do write, seems so 'artificial'. Although that is not important (and the whole point of this exercise is to practice my writing skills), I find that this holds me back. Anyway ... below is my Luxembourgish attempt. #Lëtzebuergesch Elo ass et Summer hei an der Belsch a normalerweis gëtt et an dëser Joreszäit ëmmer schéint Wieder, awer haut net. Et ass bedeckt an et gesäit aus wei et geschwënn Reen gëtt, obwuel et och sonneg ass (ganz komesch). Mir ginn gär spadséieren mee elo ...

I thought it would be nice to tell you a bit more about who I am. This makes me more than a name on the screen or a twitter account that you follow. Here we go! A long time ago I graduated as an interpreter, although I have been working as a translator for more than 15 years and never did any interpreting work. I prefer to be home, in my quiet living room, bent over a text, pencil in my mouth, wrestling with a terribly difficult sentence (preferably from a non-fiction book), my well-thumbed dictionary within reach, sweat dripping from my forehead as the deadline comes creeping up on me … No, just kidding, I am a girl of the 21st century and I do have a computer and a digital dictionary. All the rest is true though! One of my dreams was to publish a book and seven years ago, I did it, I wrote my very own 1 st book – one thing off my bucket list. It was so much fun to see the other side of the publishing process, as a book translator I am usually just one little link (at the very end...