Hi, I’m Lisa, a French to English translator specialising in arts & culture, tourism and marketing.

I live in Edinburgh with my husband and child, and a garden full of birds.

Here’s a day in my life…

The day starts like every other – with a load of washing.

Yep, no yoga stretches or self-affirmations in the mirror for me. If I don’t get my trusty Bosch whirring first thing, I just can’t settle.

Then it’s straight to work after school drop-off.

Today is a catch-up day. I have no paid work to do, so I’m tackling my to-do list, which promises a heady mix of the domestic and the professional…

09:00 Finish a post on a recent translation project, an exhibition currently running at the Panthéon in Paris (yes, plug!). Have to wait for approval from my agency before I can upload it, though. NDAs!

09:45 Order some school shirts for my son instead. All his current ones have lip smears of spaghetti bolognese across them.

10:00 Pop to the shops to get milk and bread, having booked the Sainsbury’s delivery for the wrong day mid-translation yesterday (well, that’s hyperfocus for you).

10:30 Read through a new agency contract and sign it with a clumsy electronic scrawl. Might be the start of something (?) 

11:30 Hang up washing (ooh, super fresh), think about Christmas, stop, hoover pumpkin flesh from under the kitchen table.

12:00 Newsletter blitz. Eliminate five in a row and get some useful tips, such as looking for ornithological translation work because I’m a bird nerd as well as a word nerd (thanks for the inspiration, Corinne McKay!). A few other emails get vanished too. Bam!

12:30 Lunch and some mouth gym (shout out to Isabelle Cottenet!). This is rare, but I feel the need to practise my French vowel sounds today. It’s been a while since I spoke to a real French person (ugh, should’ve married one).

13:30 The big-ticket item – upgrading my Microsoft software. After excessive research, I do this fairly easily with the help of my in-house IT guy, MS Copilot. This is where he shines.

15:00 Feeling moderately chuffed with my technical achievement when my son’s head teacher phones to say they’ve lost my child.

Right.

15:01 Run the seven minutes to school to help find him.

…

16:00 Having extracted my son from a cupboard in the gym hall and apologised to the entire staff team on his behalf, I return to my desk to edit a document. For my husband’s work. For free!

16:30 Pen this post at the last minute (it’s due tomorrow, your today). Don’t worry, I’ll redraft in the morning. I wouldn’t just plonk it down and publish on you.

17:00 The day ends with my virtual book club. Love this. Means I don’t have to make dinner.

18:00 Cross out some things on my to-do list and add some more. No obvious progress made.

Time to play some indoor football in the hallway…

Not the most dazzling of days, but a real one.