My name is Silvia Maragliano. I am an Italian translation and subtitling professional from Bologna (Emilia Romagna), and I currently live in Lugano, Switzerland.

My path to subtitling started when I was in college, at the end of my Bachelor’s. Even though I had never even heard of a subtitling software at that time, and I was kind of adverse to subtitles themselves, something told me that writing a dissertation about it was the right choice to make.

So I sneaked into a Master’s Degree Subtitling course, got my hands dirty practising with students who were older and a bit more experienced than me, and learnt the very basics of the art of subtitling.

After some years, I finished college and started working, adding to my CV a couple of professional experiences completely unrelated to translation.

Meanwhile, in 2015, I attended the ARTIS conference in London, on Research in Audiovisual Translation, thinking perhaps of a PhD.

But then I thought that I was actually more into creating my own translation business, working for and with myself only. So I attended an event for translators in Italy in 2015,

then became an intern in a translation agency and attended another translators’ event in 2016, and finally started out as a full-time, freelance translator in January 2017 (as SiMa Translation Atelier).

Last year, subtitling and I met again when I started working for some international vendors. But, more importantly, when I took up an online, practical course on subtitling and dialogues translation, taught by estimated colleagues and now also dear friends of mine.

The course taught me how to really deal with this job in the actual world, no academia, (almost) no theories. Just practice. And it actually taught me the importance of being able to control nearly every step of the subtitling production by means of the right tools,

such as yours (about which we briefly talked during the course).

My hope for the near future is to build more significant professional relationships within this–quite literally–spectacular industry, to gain more knowledge and experience, and -in two years’ time- to be able to attend the Languages & The Media Conference in Berlin.