• Home
• Services
• Rates
• About me
• Works
• Contact

Hi! I'm Mihaela and from now on I'm going to be your translator.

Born to translate

My name is Mihaela Panayotova. I was born in Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, but I grew up in different places around the world.
I made contact with my first foreign language in my Russian kindergarten and since then I continued studying this language in school, because back then in my country, Russian was just another subject, as were Maths or Geography.
I learned English during my stay in Sydney and then I improved my knowledge in this language in an English school in Cairo. Here I had no choice but to learn to read and write Arabic and I sometimes translated for my parents who understood quite a little of the language.
My next stop was Milan. Here I started going to school without knowing a single word in Italian, but after a few months of silence, I suddenly started talking and couldn’t stop anymore. Italy is my adoptive country, the country where I grew up and whose people and culture I lived with so closely, that I became one of them. After graduating from University, I moved again, and for the first time this choice was mine.
I had been studying Spanish on my own for some time and when I had the chance, I decided to apply for the Erasmus Exchange Program to improve the language and to get to know the country. I liked it so much that after graduating in Milan, I moved to Spain, where I live and work to this day. My kids are half Spanish and half Bulgarian, so I think I can say the same about myself too.

Unlike many other children, I never knew what I wanted to be when I grew up. Languages have been a part of my life ever since I was born and at home the shelves were always full of dictionaries. If someone offered out-of-school language lessons (any language!), I was the first to sign up. So I never thought of translation as a job or as something to get paid for. On the contrary, for me translating has always been a pleasure and a completely natural thing to do. This is probably the reason why I didn’t think of studying translation when I made the decision on what to do after highschool. But as time passed by, while I was working and translating part-time, I realized that this is what I do best, and above all, it’s what I most enjoy doing.
I have a passion for languages. I love living in new countries, learning their languages, knowing people and their culture, internalizing them and becoming transparent, beeing one of them. I believe in reaching the point where I think like them in order to translate every detail and every nuance as accurately as possible, and find the exact match for every word or expression. To be able to create a text that has an identity of its own and so as never to sound like a translation.

…