My experience starts on 1996 when my parents sent me for a one-year exchange program in the US (Greenville, CA) where I did my Senior year. Back in Brazil I kept studying English, finishing the pending Advanced Modules and also taking a full year teacher training course (6 months of theory plus another 6 months practice). At that moment I also took my Michigan Proficiency Diploma.

Meanwhile I had just changed my undergraduate course on Tourism to Foreign Trade. I Also started working directly with my Father in his Shrimp Exporting business.
With that I basically kept using English to write and talk to clients in Europe and Japan, adding a very technical and specific vocabulary for industry, seafood, business, and others such as ISO9000 vocabulary, Manufacturing Practices and HACCP (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points). Part of the job was also to serve as an interpreter for our client’s technicians who would usually be sent to Brazil to follow-up their company purchased production.

Later on I joined one of my father’s client, a Japanese company called Daiei Taigen, working as a quality inspector for seafood and travelling most of Brazil’s main industrial fishing areas, Japan and Mexico (at the time I had also completed the Spanish Course on a local language school). The job consisted on a lot of emails and written reports and follow-up controls (all in English).

Around 2007 I quit that job and went back to University to finish the Foreign Trade course (Commerce Exterior as called here). There I also took part on academic research team as a trainee for the Administration Master´s Degree and that included a lot of academic article translation. Also, the head of the Master’s Program (a German guy) was asked by the University to start up a new Doctorate Degree with other partner Universities in France, and Germany so basically everything on my research project was also in English. I did some small freelance jobs translating my friend’s abstracts from Portuguese to English so that they could publish their articles.

I joined a textile company in their international trade department and again I had to contact suppliers (mainly Asia and Germany), write them e-mails, solve technical and operational problems regarding import regulation, serve as a translator in many cases (for example our top boss wanted to re-negotiate a finance from one machine supplier and they demanded lots of Brazilian documents from several fields to be translated, besides the translation of many machine user’s manuals from English to Portuguese for our industrial people.

I also started giving classes on a local English school as a part time job. After a downsizing I went to work in another import company for electric components . The main difference here was that a Chinese Group had just bought that industry in Fortaleza as part of their growing plans but their team did not have much experience regarding Brazilian laws and regulations (although they had a sales office in Latin America and international policies were quite similar due to Mercosul). So besides all the above, I also had to prepare a lot of law translations with additional comments and explanations as training materials for our headquarters in China.

As we say here to our working colleagues, if you´re dealing with foreign trade, English is not a "PLUS". It´s just a "MUST". Although English was not my primary activity, everything in my job had to the done in English and a lot of my experience helped me on getting an additional vocabulary that is rarely seem on English schools. Besides that, I´ve always loved Role Play Games and fantasy books. Since Brazil is not actually a manufacturer of these products, everything was also in English.