About me

Born in Bremen, Germany, in 1950, I spent my formative years in London where my father held a post at the German embassy. Starting my schooling at a local primary school, I went on to attend the French Lycée, thus already at an early age immersed in three different languages and cultures.

After finishing secondary school in Bonn I studied music (piano) in Vienna before taking up Japanese studies, graduating with an MA at the Freie Universität Berlin. On returning from a 1-year scholarship in Kyoto, Japan, I briefly worked as a translator for Japanese.

Employment in the film industry brought about a switch to working mainly in English and French. In this period I translated film scripts and worked as a subtitler and dubbing author.

Around 1981 I started to gradually shift to translating fiction and non-fiction. To date, I have translated almost 90 books into German, including works by well-known authors such as Don DeLillo, Breyten Breytenbach, Rohinton Mistry, Colum McCann, Geoff Dyer and Garth Risk-Hallberg.

Moving to Rotterdam, Holland, in 1997, I became involved at the Tango department of the Rotterdam Conservatory (CODARTS) for a couple of years as a guest lecturer for Tango history, which also entailed processing and translating music-related texts from Spanish to English.

For a number of years I also worked as an English language teacher at the Centre for British English in Rotterdam. This experience did much to sensitize me to the inner workings of the English language, standing me in good stead for my current proofreading and translation work.

During the Corona period I completed training as a legal interpreter for Dutch and German and have since then added this activity to my portfolio.

• Gottsched Scholarship, a career development scholarship awarded by the Deutscher Übersetzerfonds, the German Translators’ Fund, 2009
• 3 week residency at the Banff International Translators Center (BILTC), Banff, Canada, 2005
• travel grant from the German translators’ association (VdÜ) to visit India, 1993
• 12-month DAAD post-graduate scholarship for Kyoto University, Japan, 1978

• CHARTERED INSTITUTE OF LINGUISTS (LONDON) www.iol.org.uk
• VdÜ (Verband deutschsprachiger Übersetzer literarischer und wissenschaftlicher Werke e.V.), (German association of literary translators) www.literaturuebersetzer.de
• VG Wort (comparable to the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society)

• Certified legal translator Dutch – German, 2020
• Cambridge/RSA Certificate in English Language Teaching to Adults, 2001
• M.A. university degree in Japanese, Sociology and Political Science, Freie Universität Berlin, 1978