I became a professor because I love language, history, culture -- the humanities. I especially enjoy making it accessible to others, hence my excitement about BrightHub. As for highlights in my background that make me a little different from other Ph.Ds you might know, I haven't always worked in academia. I enjoy the freedom and opportunities for difusing knowledge that the internet creates. In particular, I appreciate BrightHub because its creators recognize and reward the fact that opinions given by experts in their particular field are more valuable than those offered by non-specialists. Everyone wins: the experts, who get to emerge from their ivory towers; consumers, who get to make more informed purchases and industry, who get see the mirror held up to their products and hopefully improve them. In many ways, it is a world that many Renaissance thinkers envisioned.
Ph.D., Romance Languages American Translators Association Certified Technical Translator
I founded and administered the biomedical translation unit at The American National Red Cross in Washington, DC, where I developed a 16,000-term medical lexicon using Globalink’s Professional Power Translator, and where I received numerous awards for my accomplishments from Mrs. Elizabeth Dole, including one award for Best Ideas and Practices. I taught international business communication year-round from 1996-2001, including some time in Guadalajara, Jal., Mexico, at Thunderbird, The American Graduate School of International Management in Glendale, Arizona and developed curricula, where I taught Spanish to specialists in various fields as well as courses to teach translation. I participated in United Nations annual roundtables on the management of electronic lexicons and appeared in Discovery Magazine’s 1993 Discoverer Awards program in which Globalink was recognized for technological innovation. As an academic, I regularly teach classes on translation and review books on translation, both books about translation as a business, and about industry practices and the cultural and intellectual ramifications of this fascinatingly unique human enterprise. As an active, internationally published scholar, I regularly author articles, present at conferences and chair panel discussions on literature and translation (as a profession and as a scholarly pursuit). I often examine translation from cultural, technical, commercial and political perspectives. I've published several scholarly books, among which are several volumes of previously unknown music and a bilingual critical edition of St. Teresa of Avila’s complete poetry. Among my pedagogical works are three books published in the summer of 2008 dealing with aspects of Spanish grammar that are problematic for English speakers: the subjunctive, the pronoun system and the past tenses. My intellectual passion and graduate training are in Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque studies, including the arcane and esoteric traditions it inherited and passed on.