Freelance Greek to English Translator

Hourly rate: members only

Availability: members only

Willingness to travel: On request

Professional status: Freelancer

Last updated: 13 Apr 2025

Total work experience:

Language skills: English, Greek,

Personal summary

My name is Peter Close, and I am a freelance translator translating from Greek into English. I have been translating from Greek into English for 53 years. I am British by birth and descent but lived in Greece for 56 years. I started learning Greek when I first went to Greece on holiday in 1960, after having learned some Czech and Japanese when I was younger and French and German, both at home and at school. I started translating from Greek into English in 1972, after having learned and practised Greek gradually for five years and intensively between 1966 and 1971 while I was living and working in Greece and touring the entire country regularly in the course of my job. Between 1974 and 1978, I had an office in Lamia, in central mainland Greece, and regularly translated for Greek businessmen and farmers and often accompanied them on journeys to England and Northern Europe to interpret for them on their business trips or to help them locate and select calves, dairy cattle and breeding stock. Apart from being a translator, I was the managing shareholder of a Greek company importing and marketing breeding stock and veterinary health and industrial hygiene products between 1981 and 2012. In the many years that I represented large UK chemical companies in Greece, I accumulated a great deal of experience in translating chemical and pharmaceutical product licensing dossiers, marketing authorisations, health and safety data sheets, technical manuals, legislation, contracts, brochure and label texts and a very wide variety of other material into and from Greek and English, and the constant practice I had in translating such texts is proving invaluable to me now. By having represented UK manufacturers, I was able to maintain the quality and fluency of my English due to having had to correspond and communicate with the export personnel of the companies on a daily basis. I am married to a Greek and have spoken Greek with my wife and her family for all the years that I have known her. I also communicated and corresponded in Greek with all my Greek professional associates, distributors, and customers throughout the 36 years that I had commercial companies in Greece.

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