I am Mikko Hyytiälä, and I am 29-years old. I have Bachelors degree in International Relations (IR), and currently I am finishing my master's degree in IR and working on my second bachelors degree in Administrative Science.

I have worked a lot in translating EU texts from English to Finnish, on a daily basis. With my educational background in International Relations and International Law, I am very familiar working with EU texts in general. I would like to tell something more about me and my background in the following chapters to give a view of my qualifications and experience.

My last position was as a Translator/Revisor for SIA Euroscript Baltija in their Riga office. I worked mainly with EU tender documents, but also with some other EU texts. I also received full training to SDL Trados translation software. I enjoyed working as a in-house translator, but because of my wifes relocation to another job abroad I chose to move to freelance work.

Previosly I was an EU assistant in the Finnish Embassy in Ljubljana, Slovenia during the Slovenian EU precidency. My work assignments included almost everything that goes on in an embassy. Main assigments were translating texts (EU documents and other materials) from English to Finnish. My vast knowledge of EU-affairs was of great help in all these assigments, leading to more and more ambitious work assigments towards the end of my stay.

I have served in KFOR as a peacekeeper during 2000-2001 and 2002-2003 in the Kosovo province. During both my service tours, I had to do numerous translations ranging from fire control reports to search reports from English to Finnish. All these translations were done as an extra work over my normal duties.

During my service in Kosovo I was also involved in couple of bigger projects, which were done on a voluntary basis. One project was a mapping/information gathering project in the villages neighboring the town of Lipjan/Lipljan. Information gathered from this project was also translated to Finnish, and I was mostly responsible for this alone.

As a experience in translating can also be counted my work as a media correspondent in FINBN/KFOR during my service there during years 2002-2003. My work involved communicating with media and assisting in preparing of official statements. Official statements had to be written in Finnish and in English. I have also done some translations for my fiances father's tourism business, mainly concerning the company's web pages.

My skills in English are excellent, as can be seen from examples above. I am also good in working under tight deadlines or pressure. Examples of this are working under demanding deadlines in the Euroscript office, and demanding translation work during the Slovenian EU-presidency when schedules were very tight.

I have worked with computers almost all my life, over 20 years, on a hobbyist basis, so I generally have very few technical problems with my hardware/software when it comes to translation.

I feel my level of general knowledge is relatively strong, because of my strong personal interests in various different fields. My research in international relations has engulfed anything and everything between role of NGO's in modern day peacekeeping operations to role of military nanotechnology in future global power parities. Likewise, I try to follow developments in global politics, technology and other issues on a daily basis. Therefore, issues discussed on EU level are quite familiar to me.