Barbara Furtado Email and Phone Number

I have been a freelance translator for almost 10 years. My main languages pairs are English-Portuguese and Portuguese-English. Although I mostly work with academic or cientific translations, I am always happy to work on literary translations, as it reeally suits my background in literature and creative writing.

I have been an author for years. I am agented by MTS agency in Brazil (currently looking for an international agency), and I have a YA book under contract with a major Brazilian publisher. In addition to that, I have several short stories published in anthologies.

As part of my Masters degree in Linguistics I received a government stipend to be a full time student and researcher at the Federal University of Ceará. In my time there, not only I helped my advisor with class planning, I also lectured in a class of Sociolinguists, which was the field of my research, as well as advised students on the developed on their own papers in undergraduate school. For my Masters research, I gathered existing data from database, analyzes it, ran it through statistical programs and, based on my findings built, applied, rebuilt, presented and rebuilt language evaluation tests, which were then finally applied to the subjects of the field research portion of my thesis.

Teaching English as a second language to people of all ages has been an amazing experience. While I taught anything from children beginners to proficiency exam prep (especially Cambridge Exams, such as IETLS, FCE, CAE and CPE, but some TOEFL as well), teaching teenagers has always been the one job I've both loved the most and learned the most from. It teaches you many skills beyond language teaching itself that you carry for life: patience, understanding, empathy, team work, collaboration -- because a teenager won't pay attention to your class if you're up there speaking on your own, you have to make them part of your team, and learning become a mutual experience. Teaching English as a Second Language is much more than just getting into the classroom and passing on content to students, it also involves a lot of lesson planning, time management, team work with both other teachers and staff -- not to mention students themselves -- material building and organization.

As part of my internship for graduating college, I was an ESL teacher for Casa de Cultura Britânica, one of the most accredited English schools in Ceará and part of the Federal University I was studying at. For this internship, not only I taught English as a second language to Portuguese native speakers but also prepared class materials and did a lot of lesson planning that would go on a portfolio.

I worked as an online forum moderator for the Baby Center forums in Portuguese, answering costumers questions by researching the answers to their demands in the English boards and relaying back in their native language, as well as making sure everyone was respectful and polite.

Worked with children as a caretaker as part of my exchange program in 2007.