Born in Los Angeles, I have been translating from French to English for 17 years, and lived in Paris for nine years between 1990 and 1999. While in France, I attended the Sorbonne and the EHESS. I have a BA in English from UCLA, and from the Sorbonne (Licence) and a DEA from the EHESS.

During my time in France I worked as a translator and English editor and publications manager for the OECD Environment Directorate (6 years), the French Ministry of Culture, and UNESCO World Heritage. I also wrote English articles for a number of magazines, generally on Environmental, Business or Arts topics, and translated esoteric computer science texts for the LIP6 laboratory at Jussieu. My time in France has made me very familiar with French idiom and argot, and buttresses my skill in translation of snappy cultural and advertising copy.

I was involved with the French trade publishing world, and was a Frankfurt Book Fair Fellow representing France during the first year (1998) of this annual young professionals fellowship program.

Returning to the States in 1999, I worked at the German Book Office, and later as an acquiring editor with 2 mid-sized New York publishers. During the Internet boom of the times, I was hired as operations manager of a start-up serving publishers who desired to make digital versions of their publications.

While working full-time, I had several freelance projects which included continued work for UNESCO, and for New York publishers including Pantheon Books, Arcade Publishing, Zone Books, and a number of publishers of art and architecture monographs. I also worked as an English editor and publicity freelancer for other presses in New York.

Later, I worked as a project manager and account manager at Eriksen Translations in Brooklyn for two years. This has left me with many contacts and the ability to evaluate performance of translators' work, even when they are on the other side of the planet and the language pairs are unusual.

My main account at that time was the VoIP telecommunications provider, Skype, which now belongs to eBay. I initiated the agency's work with the Swedish-Estonian company and found solutions for their ambitions to make their service available globally. When I left Eriksen to move to the west coast, Skype was one of Eriksen's most important customers, and as a project manager, I built a team of over 50 translators and editors that met the company's needs to localize their website and software so that it could reach customers speaking 28 different languages. We got that huge mass of language service to Skype on time, all the time, doing html without errs, as well as UI series, and it was all put into TM.

I also have been a translator for academic works, and for bestselling books, such as Marjane Satrapi's marvelous first graphic novel about growing up in revolutionary Iran: Persepolis: A Story of a Childhood and Dominique de Villepin's Toward a New World.

Among the other accounts I managed, were arts customers, such as the Guggenheim Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Louvre, and the High Museum. Today, I work as a project manager at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

After working with many freelancers on many projects, I know that finding skilled translators for journalistic, cultural, entertainment and advertising texts is very difficult, as many translators are skilled at translating but less skilled at adapting subtle elements of style (best example is humor) into the target language. While I have a background in economics and science, I still believe that this sort of translation is the most difficult, you have to have a very good ear, and my experience is that the freelancers who excel here are rare. I excel here.

If you are looking for that person who can transform a French message into an English one, if you are looking for someone who has lots of experience in translating strings in web apps or software, and can get real technical, or if you need someone to find and manage the best translators for other language pairs, please ask me for more details.