Gustavo, as he likes to introduce himself, is an English ↔ Portuguese Conference Interpreter with more than 15 years experience. Born and bred in Recife – Northeast coast of Brazil –, he is full member of APIC – Associação Profissional de Intérpretes de Conferência, text translator and reviser, transcriber, subtitler, music and audiovisual producer, composer and singer-songwriter.
He originally started working as a freelance technical text translator – heavy machinery operations manuals, powerpoint presentations, etc. – at age 14. By then, he had been studying english for 8 years. After getting an ECPE – English language proficiency certificate from the Michigan University in 2006, he started giving English lessons and worked on a handful of interpreting assignments, becoming first acquainted with consecutive interpretation.
In October 2009, he worked on his first simultaneous interpretation assignment. From that point, it became his full time occupation. Freelance conference interpreting, due to its situational and diverse thematic nature, demands readiness from the working professional, as the interpreter can find themself doing social work with an NGO on a given day, and being in a 5-star hotel for a medical specialty congress the next.
For over a year, between 2021 and 2022, he worked daily providing consecutive over-the-phone interpreting for the UK social services. In December 2021 he began providing remote simultaneous translation weekly for Church services. The intense interpreting practice, speaking with native and non-native English and Portuguese speakers of different nationalities, and the necessity of developing a new approach for the work at hand proved to be of tremendous value for the improvement of interpreting technique and overall vocabulary.