The story behind my business: 20 years of making words work
I’m Philippa Hammond, an English-language editor and French, Spanish and Portuguese translator with more than 20 years’ experience. I started my business in 2008 because I wanted to work closely with words for organisations doing work that matters. Along the way, I realised I was an editor as much as a translator, and that my two lifelong loves – language and food – belonged in the same business.
Here’s the short version:
• Who I am: an editor and FR/ES/PT>EN translator based in West Sussex but working with clients around the world.
• Why I went freelance: I’m happiest working independently and I wanted more say in the work I do. I also have a tendency to choose challenge over convenience!
• Where my purpose comes from: translating a report on women’s rights in Nicaragua for Womankind Worldwide showed me how the right English words help organisations be heard and get funding.
• How I became an editor: clients kept asking me to revise and proofread translations. From November 2015, structured CIEP training turned that into a core service.
• Why food and policy: I’ve loved cooking since my twenties, and food-related texts have filled my desk throughout my career. Food policy is a subject where words have real consequences.
• What I believe: writing is about meaning, and getting the words onto the page is only half the work. Making them reader-focused is the other half.
If you’ve read how I became a translator, you’ll know the first part of my story, and how I specialised in the development sector. This post covers why I decided to go freelance in the first place, how I gradually realised I was an editor too, and how food ended up at the centre of it all.
The naturally independent path: why I started my own business
I’m comfortable in my own company. Even though I love people and teamwork, I’ve always been drawn to quieter, solo activities like reading and playing the piano. I thrive on slower, careful thinking and a steadier pace.
Working in a team helped me learn and grow, but I never liked having to conform to the rules of office life. My self-sufficient tendencies can mean I am stubbornly independent, but in this case they were what enabled me to start my business. And, frankly, I’ve never been comfortable with too much comfort. Given the choice, I’ll choose challenge over convenience.
But to understand why I chose the freelance path, I need to go back further.
Where my language curiosity started
I’ve always been fascinated by how language shapes the way we experience the world. I learned to read early, and at school I was the proud author of such titles as ‘The Mayor of Princess Town’. We moved house often when I was a child, and reading became a sanctuary and anchor. All that reading meant I absorbed spelling, grammar and rhythm long before I could have told you the rules.
In the first year of my BA in French and Spanish at Cardiff, I took an optional module in linguistics and communication. I devoured David Crystal’s Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language and papers on second language acquisition. My year abroad in Nantes and Barcelona, where I had to travel alone and find my own accommodation, gave my courage and independence a big boost. It also gave me a lifelong love of immersive travel.
When I chose to study translation at postgraduate level, I made sure linguistics was part of it. During my MA in Translation and Linguistics at Westminster, I realised my word nerdery went well beyond translation. I wanted to understand language as a whole. How do we acquire language? Why does one sentence land and another fall flat? Why do we trust one report and skim past another?
During that time, I felt all my dreams had come true when I got a part-time job in a children’s bookshop in north London. I learned more about the book trade than I thought possible, and read plenty of YA fiction so I could help customers find the perfect next read. All the pieces were there: linguistics, language(s), and a love of books. But I hadn’t yet discovered what I wanted to do with it all.
How did I find my ‘why’?
For my MA dissertation, I translated a 15,000-word report on women’s rights in Nicaragua from Spanish into English, working with the international charity Womankind Worldwide. I could see that my work mattered beyond the page. The right words in English helped the organisation amplify the voices of communities working for social change, and made the report more credible to the people it needed to reach.
That project showed me the general field I wanted to work in. More than 20 years later, I still choose clients who are doing work that matters: research institutes, NGOs, international organisations and, increasingly, organisations working on food. When I work on your report, I’m not just tidying sentences. I’m thinking about the job it has to do, whether that’s persuading a funder, informing a policymaker or earning the trust of the people you serve.
Why did I go freelance?
After a few years translating in-house at an international organisation, I’d earned my stripes. I got married in 2007 and moved flats across London a few times. By my late twenties, I was ready for the next challenge.
Making things more challenging (possibly more challenging than they needed to be) happened at home, too. But that was my choice.
I’d discovered that I enjoyed reading recipe books from cover to cover, visiting farmers’ markets to find the most nutritious and sustainable food, before cooking and (most importantly) sitting down to enjoy eating it. After a long day at work, I’d cook a big evening meal, usually from Nigel Slater’s Kitchen Diaries, simply because I loved cooking and wanted to get better at it. While plenty of people my age in London were shortcutting their meals, there I was, carefully tending to a pumpkin laksa in our tiny, under-equipped kitchen.
Finding the courage and embracing curiosity
When we moved to a two-bedroom flat in Forest Hill, south-east London, I finally had room for a home office. I swapped evenings in the kitchen for evenings at the computer, setting up my business.
Freelancing still felt like a big leap. What if it didn’t work out? What if I didn’t like it? So I took an evening course to qualify as a TESOL teacher, which would give me part-time work while my business got going. This was a nod to job security, but it also came from my curiosity to always be learning.
I found I adored teaching English, and I was reluctant to give it up. But after six months of marketing to translation agencies and networking, my business was more or less full-time. I couldn’t answer client emails from the classroom, and even I like to put my feet up sometimes, so I chose to focus on the business full-time from February 2008.
Some family members thought I was mad to give up the security of an in-house job. I listened but politely explained why I needed to do it. I felt terrified, but also alive.
How did I become an editor?
As my business grew, clients kept asking me to revise or proofread translations. Many freelance colleagues disliked this work, because it can easily lead to disagreements. I took a thoughtful yet pragmatic approach to it that seemed to avoid conflict.
On the first pass, I’d catch mistranslations and meaning that had slipped. On the second, I’d work on the English itself, so it read naturally without changing what the author meant. I was never there to make changes just to justify my fee, or to criticise the original translator. Clients noticed and appreciated that, and they kept coming back.
What I learned from revising multilingual content
I also kept seeing the same patterns:
• Reports by several authors with no single voice. Each section was fine on its own, but together they read like three different documents.
• Experts writing in their second or third language. They wrote competently, but not always confidently. Habits from their first language crept into their English and blurred what they were trying to say.
Having spent decades learning other languages myself, I could usually see exactly what an author was trying to say, and where grammar, style or punctuation was getting in the way. If your organisation publishes work by multilingual teams, you’ll probably recognise this. It’s still some of my favourite work.
Building my editing expertise
By the mid-2010s, my services had quietly evolved. I’d done an evening class in proofreading back in 2004, but I decided I needed proper training in copy-editing. So in November 2015 I signed up for my first course with the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP). I told myself it was just a refresher to brush up my grammar and editing skills for translation and revision work. Then I took another, and another. I found them stretching and refreshing, and I learned far more than I expected.
Clients began asking me to do more editing. I started talking about it on LinkedIn, and new editing clients found me there. I eventually upgraded to Professional Member of the CIEP and began marketing myself as an editor as well as a translator.
What began as ‘I’ll just brush up my grammar knowledge editing skills’ had quietly become a core part of my business. Since 2015, I’ve also completed training in advanced editing, substantive editing and developmental editing, and begun offering those services. Meanwhile, that love of cooking I’d discovered in my twenties was about to become important.
Why do I specialise in food and policy?
If language is one constant in my life, food is the other.
Those evenings in my tiny kitchen were only the start. I’ve always devoured recipe books, weekend food supplements and food magazines. I’ve been to more food conferences, trade shows and events than I can count. I was also coordinator of the ITI Food and Drink Network for a few years. Having children made me think much harder about food and food policy, and when my one of my children experienced health issues, it led me to read widely about nutrition.
Food has also kept turning up on my desk. I’ve worked on policy reports and evaluations on food security and nutrition, field reports, technical specifications, regulatory documents and food marketing. So when I thought about where I could add the most value, food was the obvious answer. I’m now deepening that knowledge through the Food and Public Policy course at City St George’s, University of London.
Food is also a subject where words have consequences. A term used loosely in a policy brief can undermine your credibility, and a badly translated claim on a label can mean a costly reprint. It’s exactly the kind of work where an eye for detail pays off.
What do I believe about writing?
You can tell when a piece of writing has been edited with care, even if you can’t say exactly why. It’s easier to read and easier to trust, and it stays with you. A good translation works the same way: readers forget it was ever translated.
Two ideas guide everything I do:
Writing is about meaning. If you can stop grammar, punctuation and clumsy expression getting in the way of that, you’ve done your job.
Getting the words onto the page is only half the work. Making them reader-focused is the other half.
Where am I now?
So here I am: an editor and translator with more than 20 years’ experience, a Professional Member of the CIEP as well as a Qualified Member of the Institute of Translation and Interpreting (MITI). My two loves have come together in one business. I bring a translator’s ear for meaning and an editor’s eye for detail to the work of organisations working on food, from policy reports to product specifications.
I still choose challenge over convenience, but these days the challenge is making my clients’ words work harder.
If that sounds like the kind of care and attention your project needs, let’s talk.