Two decades of translation, editing, writing, and the kind of close read a spellchecker will never do. I have been thinking and dreaming in English and French since before I was old enough to choose between them.
Los Angeles, by way of Montreal
Editor · Translator · Writer
(Let me help.)
Two decades of translation, editing, writing, and the kind of close read a spellchecker will never do. I have been thinking and dreaming in English and French since before I was old enough to choose between them.
Los Angeles, by way of Montreal
Language
Translation
Not substituting a word in one language for the same word in another. The aim is cross-cultural communication: the same story retold, accurate in the semantic sense and in the stylistic one. When the person translating calls the target language their mother tongue, the writing reaches its reader in a language they can relate to, not just parse.
Editing
A wider net than a final spellcheck: sentence structure, tone, clarity, consistency, accuracy, fact-checking, fidelity to the applicable style guide, general readability. Just as useful for material that has been translated into a second language as for original material that needs a full polish. A checklist catches errors. Curiosity catches the rest: the ambiguous total, the source that doesn’t quite say what you think it does, the sentence doing no work at all.
Writing
Writing starts with three questions: what is being said, who it is for, and how it should sound. Most drafts go wrong because one of them never got answered.
Language & AI
A good part of my work now sits between human editors and generative systems. I build and maintain proprietary translation memories, train adaptive machine-translation environments by editing what they produce, and design review agents that check generated copy against a style guide, an intended reader, and a channel. The point is that the standard holds when I'm not the one applying it.
A press release, a paid campaign, a product sheet and a long-form advisor deck each want a different voice, which is why the checks have to be different too. The systems are fast, and getting faster. Judgment is still a human job, and it's the one I'm good at.
Book
A botanical memoir about finding home through a plot in a Los Angeles community garden. About as far from optimization culture as you can get: a long quiet look at doing a hard thing slowly, and what that turns out to be worth.
Contact
It’s always best to talk it out.
roma.lakegmail.com