Born into three languages
Turkish with my mother, Albanian with my father, German with the world
Being between worlds isn't a handicap. It's a head start in translation — and most of my work since has been translation of one kind or another.
I was born in 1995 into an old, traditional Albanian family of the Fanda lineage. At home I grew up in three languages at once: I spoke Turkish with my mother and Albanian with my father — both of them fluent in both — and German with the world outside. The Turkish wasn’t incidental. In our family it was tradition to pass down Ottoman Turkish, the old Turkish, from one generation to the next, and my parents decided we would carry both tongues forward.
I grew up Muslim, and on weekends at the mosque I learned to read the Qur’an in Arabic. Later I’d add English, and during the years in Macedonia, some Macedonian too. None of this was something I chose — it was simply the air I grew up in, and it quietly shaped how I think. Before I could name it, I was already living between languages, faiths and ways of explaining the world, learning to move between them without losing myself in any one.
- Challenge
- Holding several languages, two cultures and a faith at once — Turkish and Albanian at home, German outside — from the very beginning.
- Decision
- Treat that multiplicity as normal: a richness to carry forward, never a burden to resolve.
- Action
- Grew up speaking Turkish with my mother and Albanian with my father — both fluent in both — German with the world, and learned to read the Qur'an in Arabic at the weekend mosque.
- Result
- A trilingual, multicultural foundation — later extended with English and some Macedonian — that made adaptation second nature.
- Lesson
- Being between worlds isn't a handicap. It's a head start in translation — and most of my work since has been translation of one kind or another.
- German · Albanian · Turkish · English — reads Qur'anic Arabic, some MacedonianLanguages