ITI Profile: Vivienne Cavagnoli Junior Associate

After many years of working in banking, I decided to revisit my passion for languages and combine it with new passions.

Coming from a bi-cultural background, languages have always been a part of my life. I graduated in modern languages at Sussex University and always enjoyed the translation modules the most. After living in France and Australia for a while, I settled in Sussex and started working in banking. I then had my children and life got very busy, but translation remained an interest, and I finally decided to pursue this by enrolling in an MA course in Translation Studies at Portsmouth University. I translate from Italian to English, and I have chosen to specialise in tourism, as well as food and wine translation, and Italy is obviously very fertile ground for all these things! My dissertation was a translation and commentary focussing on the River Po, its food, history and dialects. The goal was to show that tourism translation remains a reasonably AI-proof form of translation, in that it requires a lot of cultural mediation to appeal to the target audience.

As I had to combine my MA studies with a job and a young family, my only option was to study online and over three years, and although I met some people on my course in person, the networking and support that the ITI offers were invaluable. The many CPD courses on offer with the ITI are very useful when starting out and to further skills. I am now working freelance at translation, and so again having a network that I can connect with is very important. There are many networks to join, and they can be based on your areas of interest, geographical location, and language pairs.

I like that the ITI is very focussed on how to protect the industry from the effects of AI, and in a time when many are using AI translations and there are many unqualified people racing to the bottom, it is reassuring to have professional bodies like the ITI for quality assurance. ITI is constantly asking for feedback from its members so that it can keep evolving to be as useful to career progression as possible. 

Oenology has long been an interest, and I have recently completed levels 1 and 2 of the WSET (Wine & Spirit Education Trust) exams to further my knowledge. I am lucky enough to live in the sparkling wine capital of the UK and have even helped with the harvest this year to really immerse myself in the industry. I have also recently been doing some subtitling for a non-profit to develop my skills in both translation and using subtitling software.