Magdalena Balibrea Vich

I was born on November 23, 1976 in Mallorca, Spain.
I took Music and Piano lessons for 10 years when I was young, and I ended up qualifying as a Piano Teacher in 1995.

Then I went to University and studied a Bachelor of Psychology, from 1995 to 1999. I received an Award for Best Student of the Year both in 1998 and 1999.
I have been working as an officer for the Public Administration since I finished my University classes.

Since I was young, languages were my passion. Since I was already a native bilingual, speaking Spanish and Catalan at home, learning new languages happened to be somewhat easy for me. The first foreign language I studied was English, since the age of 10. I went abroad during Summers to practise it, and I took personal classes until my level of knowledge raised to where it is today.
Nowadays I have a University Certificate in English – C1 Level, which is the highest level for non-native speakers.

(See the wikipedia page here for more info about the European Framework for Languages)

When the Internet era begun, I started browsing and building websites as a hobby. I remember developing fan pages on Yahoo! GeoCities. I read forums and chats and saw the start of Internet Marketing. I never really got too invoved with Marketing, but I noticed most people promoting websites, products and games only spoke English, and I thought I could help them translate their stuff into Spanish, the 3rd most spoken language by internet surfers worldwide, after English and Chinese.

I started doing small website translations for webmasters that I contacted on forums such as DigitalPoint or GetAFreelancer, and moved on from there. I realized I needed a qualification in order to become a professional translator, so I went back to University and took a Master in Translation in 2005. As I already had some experience in translation before this Master, I could apply all the theory I was taught to practical situations that I had been presented with in the past.

• how to setup and work with WordPress blogs and Joomla sites (This site of mine is a sample of one of my sites built on WordPress)
• how to produce PDF and EPUB files for my translated texts (I have basic knowledge of InDesign and QuarkXpress)
• how to write articles in Spanish and translate articles optimized for web promotion (keyword oriented)
• how to write text for websites with SEO in mind (so webmasters can use my Spanish content straight out of the box)

Please check my blog for my latest posts about on-going and completed projects.