My name is Matthew McGaughey. I can’t say that translation was a career choice for me—language study found me, not the other way around. It was a life-changing experience. One day, When I was 17 years old, I was sitting with my older sister, a classical musician who had just returned from her junior year abroad in Bordeaux. She got a call from a French friend, and I watched in amazement as she proceeded to speak fluent French for a few minutes. The feeling was indescribable—here was a completely different person, with a completely different personality, inhabiting my sister’s body. In that instant, I knew that I had to be like her, no matter what it took. In a word, she was cool. Since that day, I have devoted almost all of my time to the study of languages. After majoring in French at the University of California, Berkeley and spending a year in France, I moved to Munich, where I spent five years. I studied translation and interpretation at the Munich Foreign Languages and Interpreters Institute and received my State Certification as a German-English translator and interpreter with a specialization in law and business. I worked as an in-house translator for the Bayerische Hypotheken- und Wechsel-Bank and subtitled German films for Teleculture Inc. I then spent three and a half years in Tokyo learning Japanese, where I worked in-house translating for Asahi Chemical Industry Corp. After marrying and starting a family, I was fortunate enough to live for two and a half years in the PRC, both in Beijing and Shanghai.