Sidharta Books & Print

From scalping cinema tickets with his fellow gang members on the streets of the former Yugoslavia, to becoming one of South Australia’s most respected and experienced interpreters, Michael Gostich’s life certainly didn’t turn out quite how he’d planned.
With dreams of becoming a rock musician, Michael risked certain death in a dramatic escape from Tito’s tyrannical Communist regime in 1963, eking out a living in Europe and Britain before finally ending up in South Australia and becoming involved in the two professions he grew to love—interpreting and translating.
Interpreting between languages is among the oldest professions, dating back thousands of years. In an increasingly globalised world, it has become a vital tool for communication between and within nations. In Australia, the interpreting industry experienced a marked growth in the latter part of the 20th Century, when the country seriously acknowledged that it was indeed a multicultural society.
Michael Milorad Gostich gained his qualifications as an interpreter and translator in 1980, working in English, Serbian and Croatian languages. In I, Interpreter, the only book of its kind to be published in Australia, Michael gives a fascinating account of his personal life experiences, from the comic to the tragic, as well as insights into the practice and theory of interpreting and translating.
Part drama, part crash course in the crafts of interpreting and translating, I, Interpreter is both an entertaining and enlightening read.