Christine's biography

Christine’s parents worked with the US Foreign service, and so, though she was born in the USA she spent very little time there as her family lived in Europe and Africa during her childhood. When her father retired in 1971 the family moved to the UK, where (apart from a five-year break in Geneva) Christine has lived ever since.

Christine says that the most obvious sign that she is a product of her childhood is her profession.

She is a freelance conference interpreter and a course leader on the University of Westminster’s postgraduate course in conference interpreting. Her languages are English (A – it’s her ‘mother tongue’) French B (it’s an active language) and Spanish C (it’s passive: she understands it but does not interpret into Spanish).

With her ‘mid-Atlantic’ English it is sometimes hard to tell where Chrisine is from just by listening to her (and the same is true of her non-specific French accent), though, as she says “I think the world can do with an uprooted American, so it doesn’t worry me too much.”

Christine says she feels most at home in London, and in Cambridge where she was an undergraduate, and where she has lived for the past twenty years because her husband, academic and author Pete de Bolla, teaches there. A few years ago they moved to the village of Shepreth, a few miles outside the university town where Christine celebrates “lots of room, a South-facing garden, plenty of opportunities for music, books, cooking and entertaining - and a station five minutes’ walk away.”