Nicholas Baker

I am a fully qualified secondary school teacher specializing in Modern Foreign Languages (Spanish up to A-level and French up to KS4), and am currently making moves towards starting out in freelance translation while continuing to teach languages and humanities at a local secondary school. Before taking up my current position, in which I am employed directly by the school on a temporary basis, I had undertaken a number of long-term assignments through a supply agency, covering for absent MFL teachers, over a period of years, but had also enjoyed the variety of day-to-day general cover in a range of schools, both at secondary and primary level. I have found that supply work has allowed me, generally, to enjoy greater amounts of free time in which to pursue time-consuming interests, including playing the classical guitar (I have spent countless hours over the last year or so retrieving my ability to play this instrument, and have recently begun to teach myself to play a Renaissance lute), walking and birdwatching. Before I became a school teacher, I had always thrived on the academic challenge of translating texts of various kinds; I loved researching topics and consulting my dictionaries in order to produce the best possible translation of whatever I was working on. I had also found that it was something I appeared to have a particular aptitude for (in my final exams at Exeter, for example, I got the highest mark that my tutor had seen, in her time at the university, for the written Spanish exam, which involved translating texts into, and out of, Spanish). I now intend to develop this talent, and to take even more control over my work-life balance, by breaking into the world of freelance translation.