About me
I grew up in France and moved to Seattle in 2006, originally for what was supposed to be a year. Somehow, that one year turned into almost eight.
I studied at the University of Washington and taught French to undergraduate students along the way. More generally, I spent those years living most of my life in English. That probably taught me more about how people actually use language than most of what I learned from textbooks. After enough time abroad, you become very aware that a sentence can be perfectly correct and still sound like something no human being would actually say.
Eventually I moved back to France and translation became my full-time work. Since then, I’ve worked on children’s books, fiction and nonfiction, websites, apps, editorial content, YouTube and other digital material, as well as interpreting assignments — along with the occasional project that sends me down a research rabbit hole I had absolutely no intention of entering.
That variety is one of the things I like most about the job. One week I might be trying to preserve the rhyme in a children’s book; another, researching monastic terminology in a historical French text. With fiction, much of the work is about finding the right voice, keeping dialogue natural and making sure characters still sound like themselves from one chapter to the next.
For some fiction and literary projects, and with the client’s agreement, I also collaborate with my sister, a librarian in Paris who has a particularly good ear for natural French. Having another careful reader involved is useful on long manuscripts, especially when you’ve been staring at the same characters and sentences for several weeks and can no longer entirely trust your own eyes.
I was fairly reluctant to use AI at first. But translation is hardly the first profession to be changed by new technology, and at some point you either adapt or get left behind. On some longer projects, I now use it to help produce a rough first pass before rewriting and reviewing the text myself, often several times. It makes the mechanical side of the work more efficient, but the decisions that matter — voice, rhythm, consistency, research and judgement — are still human ones. I don’t think a good translator can be replaced by a machine. Not yet, anyway.
I also tend to get involved beyond the translation itself. If something in the original doesn’t make sense, I’ll ask. If I spot a factual inconsistency, I’ll flag it. If a translation is technically accurate but simply doesn’t sound right, I’ll say so and suggest something better. I’ve never been particularly good at pretending not to notice things.
These days I live in Phuket, Thailand, where I’ve been based for the past five years. Most of my clients are in Europe, North America and Australia, so working across borders has more or less become normal. I work mainly from English into French, but I also take on selected French-to-English projects when the subject and style are a good fit.
I work independently and deal directly with the people who hire me. I prefer it that way. On longer projects in particular, I like getting to know the author or team behind the work, understanding what they are trying to achieve and staying involved through to the final version rather than simply sending back a translated file and disappearing.
Outside work, I read, run, surf, grow things with varying degrees of success and continue the very slow process of learning Thai. I also train in Muay Thai and, for a while, took it seriously enough to have a brief professional fighting career in Thailand — probably the least obvious line on a translator’s résumé.
MA English Literature, UVSQ · MA Public Policy, University of Washington · Native French · Based in Phuket, Thailand