Careers in Translation
By Claire Jeantheau
It’s all Greek to me. Like trying to read hieroglyphs. Lost in translation. In English, a full range of idioms exists, paradoxically, to express a struggle to communicate. There may always be a gap, however slight, between people who use two different sets of words—even in the same language. The linguists, interpreters, and translators you’ll meet here have all experienced that, whether during international negotiations or observing reactions to a local dialect. But they’ll also attest to how working between languages and their variations has helped them form friendships, embrace literature, and gain a new appreciation for other parts of the world. For all of them, it’s an affinity that can be traced back to their studies at Commonwealth.
The Polyglot: Selim Earls ’80
It started with French and Spanish at Commonwealth (along with Latin, “sort of against [his] will”). Then came a bachelor’s degree in Mandarin and side studies in Russian and German. Before he knew it, Selim Earls was flexing his knowledge of Greek while working in Athens—plus learning Turkish to get to know his new neighbors.
Is it enough? “When I retire, I will maybe undertake one final adventure” in language, he muses. Sign languages, which the linguistic community is now studying with more inclusive attitudes, fascinate him: “Many people [once] considered them simplistic or primitive and not fully-fledged languages. That’s not the case anymore.” Should he add one to his list?
“I’m motivated by language as a means to be able to travel to different places, to communicate with people with different experiences and backgrounds, and to learn about different parts of the world and ways of living in it from direct experience,” Selim says, delivering what could be the manifesto for his career as an interpreter and translator. His current and longest-standing role, held for nearly three decades, has been interpreting for the European Union in Brussels, Belgium, where he lives with his family.
It can be a challenge to establish the kind of connection he speaks of when he’s working in tense situations. “ The names of things—places, people, concepts—sometimes can be politically charged,” Selim says. “If I just translate word-for-word without putting it into the context of the listener, it can lead to a distortion.” Case in point: While Selim was interpreting at a one-on-one meeting of the Greek and Turkish ministers of education, the Turkish minister led with a thought about how they had Thessaloniki and the Aegean Sea in common. To his counterpart, that could’ve sounded, if rendered literally, like a threat to national sovereignty.
“The Turkish minister was trying to be very friendly and warm,” Selim explains, but “if you say those things, that [the territories] are shared between the two countries, that’s a big no-no,” given Greece and Turkey’s history of animosity. “I couched the message of the Turkish minister in a way that made it clear that the intention was ‘we are here meeting in a common place, a place of shared history.’”
On the whole, though, a current of understanding runs through his experiences with fellow language lovers. As a University of Pennsylvania undergraduate, he greeted international students arriving at the airport while working as a college secretary, connecting with them in their first languages. He lights up when he reminisces about kickstarting relationships through “informal translations in groups of friends.” And Selim hopes to pass on this love to another generation over the next few years through teaching: “Sharing their experience of learning languages, helping them with idioms or common everyday expressions—that’s the sort of thing that a kid wants to learn.”
Cool Under Pressure: Daniela Ascoli ’84
After Sergio Mattarella was elected as President of Italy in 2015, one of his first visits to a fellow head of state was to Queen Elizabeth II. There in the crowd in England was Italian citizen and Commonwealth exchange student Daniela Ascoli, feeling “very proud” to be selected to translate his remarks in real time.
It wasn’t Daniela’s first visit to Buckingham Palace; she’d been invited back after providing her services as a simultaneous interpreter to Prince Philip.“I always have to study a lot because no job is like another,” Daniela says, and she has the monthly calendar to prove it: “One day I work for a political meeting. The following week, I work for a medical conference and then trade unions. Sometimes I work for the BBC when something has happened that’s time sensitive—they call you, and you have to rush there.”
Her role is one that she has trained extensively for since she was a young adult. Daniela opted to spend a high-school semester abroad at Commonwealth practicing her English in preparation for entering a demanding interpretation training program. “It was a very nice experience,” she says, contrasting her daily immersion in downtown Boston—“it’s a very European-like city, so I felt more at home”— with escapades in the woods at Hancock. Italian was offered at Commonwealth then, and Daniela helped out in class, demonstrating a native speaker’s pronunciation.
Daniela’s interpretation clients over the years have included the British and Italian governments, the Council of Europe, and the World Bank of Washington. People often assume, wrongly, that she enters these spaces alone. In many situations, she relies on an interpretation booth partner to check her work and relieve her on breaks (and vice versa). “The maximum you can work on your own is forty-five minutes. After that, the quality starts going down, and you don’t want that,” she says. Those unfamiliar with the field “don’t understand how strenuous and tiring, both mentally and physically, interpreting is.”
Help from her partners is paramount, but, according to Daniela, it’s also internal character—not just translation ability—that helps you keep your head while interpreting live. “You need to be able to work under pressure, because you’re constantly under pressure. You cannot lose your concentration for half a second,” she says. “It’s all a matter of character, really. You need to be somebody who’s not nervous. You need to keep your cool.”
Generational Shifts: Aaron Dinkin ’98
Cooperstown, New York, is home to the Baseball Hall of Fame, a significant tourism industry, and one of many instances of a distinctive regional dialect: the Northern Cities Shift. Aaron Dinkin, a linguistics professor at San Diego State University, is most interested in this last detail.
In the Northern Cities Shift, the sounds of vowels swap places and shift around the mouth. Words like “cat” and “black” are pronounced with a vowel like the “eah” in “yeah”; meanwhile, the sounds of “cot” and “block” mirror those of “cat” and “black” in other dialects. (Fans of TV series The Bear, which takes place in Chicago, can spot the shift when characters Richie and Fak are speaking.) In upstate New York locales like Cooperstown, the shift is receding in the younger generation—“it’s very common among Baby Boomers, but since then, it’s sort of been on the downswing,” Aaron says—and he wants to discover why.
To do that, he conducts interviews to document both what people say (measuring acoustic features of vowel pronunciation in select words, for example) and what they think about how they say it. So far, Aaron’s learned, as older residents’ receptivity to the tourism industry increases, their use of the shift decreases. On the other hand, “for younger people, the difference mainly seems to be between careful and casual styles of speaking,” he observes. In the 1990s, many speakers with the Northern Cities Shift didn’t think they had an accent. Now more conscious that their speech might come across as “sounding uneducated or like bad English or nonstandard,” they often alter their patterns—a posture that, Aaron says, can be influenced by a pervasive “classist” notion that “some ways of using language are incorrect or bad.”
Aaron’s interest in language variation emerged at Commonwealth almost by chance. After dropping in on Claire Hoult’s “History of the English Language” class during a day visit, he thought, “‘That was amazing. Any school that offers this class is somewhere I want to go to.’” (He took the course, which spanned the Middle Ages to the Boston accent of today, in his sophomore year.) His research as a University of Pennsylvania graduate student began with a similar serendipity: his advisor’s studies of the Northern Cities Shift had just been published in the Atlas of North American English, and the drive from Philadelphia to upstate New York was a doable weekend trip.
His sociolinguistic research motto? “‘Find someone who doesn’t seem to be doing anything and say hi.’’ Aaron’s first day in Cooperstown conveniently coincided with the library book sale—“That is catnip for me. I would go there under any circumstances”—and the volunteers there drew on their networks in town to put him in touch with potential interviewees. “If you show up and you’re sincerely interested in listening to them and learning from them about their lives and about their communities,” Aaron reflects, “people are often just willing to talk to you.”
Games Across Culture: Wren Steinbergh ’09
In the 2009 Commonwealth yearbook, the senior class selected Wren Steinbergh as “Biggest Japanophile.” It was a fitting sendoff. When not taking Japanese language classes at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education, Wren relished studying the nation’s history in class with Commonwealth history teacher Barb Grant—especially through The Pillow Book, a piquant record of the tenth-century imperial court written by a lady-in-waiting.
More than fifteen years and a degree from Japan’s Kansai College of Business and Languages later, Wren has, without a doubt, fulfilled her senior superlative. Building a career as a Japanese-to-English translator, she’s found a niche in mobile and anime tie-in games, adapting the cutscenes, credits, and captions that move stories along.
There’s an ongoing balancing act in Wren’s industry between localization and translation—the extent to which content should hew to its original form or be adapted for an outsider audience. Some choices come down to individual words: “Do you want to call it a ‘rice ball’ or an ‘onigiri’?” Others touch on deeper cultural nuances. “Tone of speech is a big one,” Wren says. “There are a lot of things in Japanese, like levels of formality, that are conveyed via grammar that you have to think about when you’re trying to convey a character’s particular voice in English.”
For Wren, context is king. Her first translation jobs dealt with educational products: building kits and textbook manuals about robotics, coding, and science experiments (including, memorably, a “Learn Programming with Megaman” collaboration with famed game company Capcom). Then, she would call on friends in programming to help explain words she was unfamiliar with. Now, she’s challenged when developers send her isolated sentences—which, in Japanese, are often subjectless—to translate without a storyline. (Fan-made wikisites often come to the rescue.)
Wren has adopted Nintendo as a model, praising their strong commitment to translation quality for an audience that may not be “keyed into the original Japanese.” “You want to try to remember: what is it about the literal thing that you are trying to preserve? Is there an ambiguity in the original language that you need to keep in your version?” Wren asks. She knows from experience that her games may be some players’ first, brief introduction to an entirely new culture.
Life in Transition: Ellen Elias-Bursać ’70
A few miles from 151 Commonwealth Avenue, translator Ellen Elias-Bursać remembers, the Museum of Science once unfurled a large banner on its roof that declared to pedestrians along the Charles River: “It’s alive!”
Inverted, this exclamation guides her practice: “Is it alive?” “You can make a sketchy little immediate translation of almost anything,” Ellen says. “But it’s not there yet.
That’s just a start. Then you have to live with it for a while.” Ellen has lived with translating for a while—almost fifty years, in fact—with numerous travels and course changes. While her Commonwealth French classes were “enough that I could get into a cab and give directions to somebody in Paris,” her true love was Russian with Natasha Grigg. As Ellen cackled over stories in her textbook A Russian Course, starring “hooligans” who loitered on trolleybuses, Natasha was “really open[ing] my eyes to the excitement of language stuff,” she says. A few years later, she was off to the University of Zagreb in Croatia for an M.A., along with a job as a community translator. Ellen would render whatever people approached her with—promotional materials for a television series, reports for the Institute of Meteorological Research—from Croatian to English.
In 1998, following the horror of the Yugoslav Wars, Ellen found herself in the translation unit of The Hague’s war crimes tribunal, supervising the production of documents for use as evidence. The work required absolute precision, and the team grappled with how to maintain accuracy between languages with very different grammatical structures. “One of the things that came up at the tribunal all the time,” Ellen remembers, “is that in Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian, when there’s an action, you always tie in the body part that’s involved with it—you say ‘he hit him with his fist’ or ‘with his foot.’ And if you think about how we say that in English, we say ‘he punched him’ or ‘kicked him.’”
Upon returning to the United States, Ellen took up literary translation, where, unlike with several of her previous assignments, one-to-one literalisms are not the end goal—there’s room for ambiguity. “I sometimes feel bogged down by writers who have to tell you everything and flog dead horses all the time,” she says, preferring to leave room for the reader’s interpretation. Her recent projects include producing English versions of two novels by Croatian author Damir Karakaš: Celebration (a history of human failure and the endurance of nature in an unsettled Croatian region) and Blue Moon (the comic tale of an Elvis wannabe).
The line from A Russian Course to contemporary Central European fiction has been a winding one, and that’s fine with Ellen. “Translation takes you in many different directions,” she says. “It’s always teaching you things that you didn’t have an opportunity to learn before.”
Claire Jeantheau served as Commonwealth’s Communications Coordinator before becoming the Marketing Manager for the American Exchange Project. This article originally appeared in the summer 2025 edition of CM, Commonwealth's alumni/ae magazine.