Alexia Sloane lost her sight when she was two following a brain tumour. But she has excelled at languages and is already fluent in English, French,
Spanish and Mandarin.
Now she has experienced her dream job of working as an
interpreter after East of England MEP Robert Sturdy invited her to the parliament building in Brussels.
Alexia has been tri-lingual since birth as her mother, a teacher, is half
French and half Spanish, while her father, Richard, is English.
She started talking and communicating in all three languages before she lost her sight but adapted quickly to her blindness. By the age of four, she was reading and writing in Braille.
When she was six, Alexia added
Mandarin to her portfolio. She will soon be sitting a GCSE in the language having achieved an A* in French and Spanish last year. Alexia said: 'I love learning languages. Spanish and French were quite easy to learn, but
Chinese is hard because you have to get the tones perfect. 'My way of looking at is that without language we wouldn't know anything about the world. 'At the age of six I said to my mother I wanted to learn another language and she said 'alright how about Chinese?'. So I did. I want to learn Arabic and Russian next.
Alexia has wanted to be an interpreter since she was six and chose to go to the European Parliament as her prize when she won a young achiever of the year award.
