My name is Emese Filus, and I am in love with language.

Writing it, speaking it, translating and interpreting it. Moulding it with great love, care and skill for the satisfaction of my clients, their end clients and myself.

This love story started when I was 10, during my first year of learning English in a small, rural school in Hungary. This was in the early 90s, pre the internet and just post the fall of the communist regime, which means that getting hold of English language original content was nowhere near as easy as it is today. But I was single-minded and passionate. I consumed everything I could get my hands on. My goal soon became to study English at university “in the big city”.

With a double major, I studied English and American studies at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. We didn’t have minors at the time (it was the old system), but my main focus was on literature. In my final year, journalism won me over, and I ended up choosing journalism subjects for my masters theses.

After graduation, I worked as an ESL (English as a second language) teacher in the private sector, teaching adults with the goal of helping them use English in their professional lives. I loved it. As I was in my early-to-mid 20s, my students were often older than me. It was a humbling and beautiful way to come of age and cut my teeth as a freelance professional.

Within a few years, I co-founded my own small language school and continued to serve the business sector in Budapest with English lessons under my own, new umbrella. For those first few years, I was focused on making a living, building a business and teaching my students, building their confidence in speaking a foreign language through both knowledge and skill.

In the meantime, shortly after graduation, my love for the written language inspired me to moonlight as a translator, which quickly became a second career. I was soon hired to join the freelance translators’ team of National Geographic Channel Hungary. Those five years were some of the most formative of my professional life and through 500+ films of every conceivable subject, I learned more than I could have imagined. I also learned a lot about cooperation between experts and linguists, which was another humbling experience. Our wizard of an editor taught me a lot about the magic of editing, as well. As moonlighting goes, this was a pretty special one.

As I was approaching the end of my 20s, I got a new bug – a nagging ambition to learn another foreign language, return to university and become a professional simultaneous interpreter. The one in the booth with the headset. The type standing next to world leaders and facilitating communication between people of foreign lands. I imagined myself as a vessel that lets language flow through itself like water.

On the wings of such dreams I started learning French, flew right back to uni, and completed a prestigious – and frankly, quite intimidating – interpreting program called European Masters of Conference Interpreting, just before I turned 30. That university program changed my life. In the following years I focused on building a new career in interpreting and translation, and slowly said goodbye to my students over the next couple of years.

This new chapter of my life was exciting and revelatory. Interpreting opened up a brave new world, where the learning curve was steep and brutal. There is no kiddy pool, only the deep end. For a perfectionist like me, conference interpreting teaches a hard but necessary lesson about limits and how to be the best you can be under the circumstances, nothing more, but also nothing less.

As the interpreting and translation industries are intertwined, I simultaneously continued to develop the translation leg of my new business. After a few years of trying my hand at pretty much everything, a preference and a demand started to crystallise, and more and more clients engaged my services for marketing translations. I found, somewhat unexpectedly, that given the skills required for that kind of work, I could make great use of my passion for writing and creativity. My focus started to narrow to the point that 90% of my translation work at the moment is marketing translation or transcreation. I enjoy talking to the customers through copy, imagining how the lines will make them feel.

This is a perfect double life, because it channels the same passion into two activities that work my brain very differently and have different demands on me personally and professionally. 

The first few years of my interpreting life were spent with conferences of every kind, TV interviews, festivals, theatre shows, stage appearances and even a radio documentary shoot with the BBC, which was one of the most special five days of my life. It all came to a screeching halt in early 2020, when the pandemic hit. The interpreting industry, however, quickly reinvented itself through the already emerging remote technology, which skyrocketed in the following months. It broadens the opportunities for clients, agencies and interpreters alike, and perhaps makes for a quieter, more balanced working life.

While I continue to cherish and nurture my translation and interpreting career, I devote much of my free time to one of my oldest loves, writing, and I have recently enrolled in the Freelance and Feature writing program of the London School of Journalism. All for the love of language.