I am a fluent Arabic, French and English speaker, with 29 years' experience in translation for the BBC and US counterpart media organization, media analysis, training and team management.

I left Tunisia, my country of origin at the age of twenty three, to do research at the Sorbonne University, Paris, which led to a PhD - with honors - in theoretical linguistics.

After 10 years in France, the BBC offered me a job as an Arabic and French news monitor where I joined the BBC Monitoring Department to monitor the North African, Middle East and French media, select important stories and translate them in a timely, accurate and reliable manner.

After five years in the job, I was appointed a Duty Editor in charge of the North Africa team, to recruit, train, and manage staff but more importantly meet customers' needs and keep them satisfied with a high quality product based on a good knowledge of the region of coverage, its politics and its media, a good selection of news material, and a good final product based on accurate and timely translations. Ten years later, I was asked to manage the Western Europe and Latin America team, with special focus on French media.

In 2007, I opted for early retirement and sought new horizons after having acquired a vast experience in translation, recruitment, training and management, in addition to a thorough knowledge of the North African, Middle Eastern and French media and politics.

In 2008 after being tasked by BBC Monitoring's US media partner, the Open Source Center, to train new journalists in their office in Doha, Qatar, and based on the success of that experience, I was offered a permanent job by Open Source Center at their London Bureau as an Arabic media analyst, with special focus on Saudi Arabia and the Gulf countries. I spent four years with OSC during which my job and skills shifted from translation to analysis of the media and political situation in that part of the world. The regional unrest, exacerbated with the spread of terrorism, the succession issues in Saudi Arabia, added to the uncertainties suffered by the Middle East. The human rights' issues, the oil importance of the Kingdom, and regional divisions between the Shiite Sunni camps, added to the complexity of the regional situation and made my job and that of my colleagues very interesting as we managed over a number of years to help decipher the significance of those events and their impact on the region and the whole world. We were even able to sketch possible outlooks and draw possible scenarios for the future on the basis of the lessons of the past and the significance of the here and now.

Since the beginning of 2012, I have been working as a freelance Arabic and French translator for two important clients: BBC Monitoring, and OSC. For the former, I was tasked with translating North African material from Arabic and French media, with special focus on political, security and energy developments in Algeria mainly from the Algerian media in French. As for OSC, I was tasked for two years with processing daily highlights from 10 prominent Saudi newspapers and draw a daily press selection list on all the important issues of the day. However, in the past year, their focus has shifted to North Africa, and based on my expertise on the region, I have been tasked with covering developments from Libya to Morocco. Moreover, I have been tasked with for the last six months to train two ladies working for OSC from Rabat, Morocco, on translation issues, by editing their material and giving them daily feedback on their work in addition to putting their material on line in a timely manner for customers.

For having closely worked with many Arab nationalities, I have acquired over the years a good understanding of the majority of Arab dialects from Yemen to Mauritania, which proved to be helpful in translation voice and video material from various Arab media sources.