ATA certified translator in French, German ane Portuguese into English, specializing legal, financial accounting reports and supervisory texts, especially in the Swiss securities exchanges.  I am also a dual ciitizen of the US and Costa Rica, where I have acquired native proficiency in Spanish over the past 13 years. I have translated countless thousands of pages for satisfied customers in French, German, Portuguese, Spanish, Russian and Italian.
It is my policy to do sufficient research to understand the source text (even if that requires a lot of "Googling") and to express the author's intention in clear idiomatic English rather than in word-for-word "translatese".
I did not just stumble into translation because of a lack of career alternatives or a bilingual background. I am a linguist with a passion. Most of my life life has been devoted to studying foreign languages and living in foreign cultures, and I truly consider myself to be a citizen of the world.
I spent ten years working intensely as a legal/technical translator in Paris, while simultaneously obtaining a doctorate in semiotics, and have worked and studied for extended periods in Germany, Mexico (where I taught French at the University of Guadalajara), Brazil (teaching English and studying Portuguese), Morocco (where I taught English and American Literature at the University of Tetouan for two years while studying Spanish -- I completed the "nivel superior" at the Instituto Cervantes with the score "sobresaliente" -- as well as Arabic). I have also lived in Moscow twice (total of 18 months), where I taught English and studied Russian, and spent similar periods in Warsaw and Istanbul. More recently, I studied Italian in Rome, where I completed the highest level course at Scuola Leonardo da Vinci with the score "molto buono", and recently continued my studies of Spanish in the Dominican Republic, Costa Rica and Argentina. As of the time of this writing, I am living and working in San José, Costa Rica.
After majoring in German and Psychology as an undergraduate, I studied two years of law (which greatly facilitated my entry into legal translation) but later changed my course of studies to languages and literature (Master's Degree with distinction in comparative literature from IU). I then moved to Paris and received a DEA with Julia Kristéva followed by a "Nouveau Doctorat" (the French degree designed to be equivalent to a PhD) in semiotics from the University of Paris VII, where I wrote a dissertation (in French) on translation of literary and political discourse in French, German and English. In the context of my M.A. program, I studied on a special scholarship at the Freie Universität in Berlin, where I received an excellent introduction into German history, politics, sociology and economics.