Translation studies postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

My interest in translation became concrete in my second year, when I was asked to produce an English version of a short Catalan-set travel blog for a university society newsletter. The original was chatty, full of regional food names and half-jokes about buses. I spent longer deciding whether to keep "esmorzar" with a gloss than I had spent on the whole first draft. That small task showed me that translation is not a search for equivalents but a series of arguments about audience, and I have wanted to study those arguments properly ever since.

My degree in French and Spanish gave me the linguistic foundation, but it was my final-year dissertation that shaped my academic direction. I compared two published English translations of a collection of contemporary Spanish short stories, focusing on how each handled colloquial dialogue and the narrator's shifts in register. One translator standardised the speech of working-class characters; the other used British regional markers that seemed to relocate the story entirely. Reading Lawrence Venuti on domestication and foreignisation helped me name what I was seeing, though I found his framing more useful as a starting point than as a verdict, since both translations made losses and both had defensible reasons. Working through Mona Baker's discussion of equivalence at different levels also pushed me to be more precise: much of what I had loosely called "tone" was actually happening in collocation and cohesion. I would like to develop this interest further, particularly in translation for publishing and in how retranslation is justified to readers.

My year as a language assistant in a school near Valencia was where I learned how quickly translation becomes negotiation. I was regularly asked to explain English idioms to teenagers who wanted a single Spanish phrase in return, and to help staff with the wording of letters to parents of English-speaking pupils. Neither task allowed for a tidy solution; both taught me to ask what the text was for before deciding how to render it. I also began keeping a notebook of Valencian expressions that resisted translation into Castilian, which made me more curious about linguistic variation within a language, not only between languages.

Since graduating I have worked three days a week as an administrator at a housing advice charity. The role is mostly appointments, case records and chasing paperwork, but I am sometimes asked to sit in when a Spanish-speaking client needs a letter explained. I am careful about the limits of this: I am not a trained public service interpreter, and I say so, but the experience has taught me a great deal about clarity, about the consequences of a misread deadline, and about the ethical questions that arise when the person translating is not neutral. The charity's plain English guidance for its own letters has also been unexpectedly instructive about readability decisions I had only met in theory.

Alongside work, I share the care of my grandmother with my mother and uncle, which usually means Saturdays and one weekday evening. It has made me organised out of necessity, and I do my reading in fixed blocks rather than hoping for long free stretches. My grandmother grew up speaking Irish at home and English at school, and her stories about switching between them, and about words she has never found an English version of, are a reminder that these are ordinary questions people live with rather than only academic ones.

I am looking for a programme that combines translation practice with critical theory, so that I can justify my choices as well as make them. In the longer term I hope to work in translation for publishing or in editorial work alongside continued Spanish and French practice, and postgraduate study is the training I need to do that seriously.

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