Profile

Hiroko Fukai

Freelance Interpreter: English – Japanese

Specializing in interpreting for VIPs, sports events, film festivals, various receptions and business negotiations.

Biography:

While enrolled in English department at Hosei University, I was awarded a scholarship to study abroad.

I spent a year at the University of California, Davis, majoring in Communication Studies and English Literature.

After graduating, I joined Mitsubishi Corporation LT, Inc. 5 years later, I decided to pursue a career as an interpreter.

What made me want to become an interpreter.

“Roman Holiday” was the first English movie I watched and I was fascinated by it. I was in junior high school at the time and watching movies became my hobby. I gradually came to want to enjoy movies without subtitles and that was one of the biggest motivation for me to learn English.

I am currently working as an interpreter, and there is a lot to learn with each job. Not only do I have to read through a huge amount of material, but I also have to spend a lot of time researching the client’s industry and the speaker’s background. So often the preparation time takes longer than the actual interpreting.

Even so, the moments when I can understand the speaker’s words as if I were holding them in my hands, and interpret them feeling that the translation were coming naturally to me, are the most enjoyable moments of interpreting. I also think that being able to meet and talk directly with experts from various industries is a great pleasure as an interpreter.

Japanese and English have different grammar and ways of expression, and sometimes it is difficult to convey the meaning if you translate directly, but I always try to interpret in a way that listeners can understand what the core messages are. I hope that I can be a bridge for communication through interpreting.