selected work from my time as a translator

From 2002 to 2019 I worked as a freelance translator and copywriter. Here, some samples of that work for you to read.

articles

Journalists again sound the alarm about Free Press Unlimited by Maite Vermeulen (translated from the Dutch original here)

How Free Press Unlimited silenced its own journalists by Maite Vermeulen (translated from the Dutch original here)

Why electric cars are always green (and how they could get greener) by Thalia Verkade (translated and adapted from the Dutch original here)

Bermuda? Guess again. Turns out Holland is the tax haven of choice for US companies by Jesse Frederik (translated and adapted from the Dutch original here)

This is what it was like to give a TED talk by Rutger Bregman (Dutch original here)

The Dutch Donald Trump wasn’t stopped, he was copied by Rutger Bregman (The Guardian reprinted a modified version)

How billions vanish into the black hole that is the security industry by Dimitri Tokmetzis and Maaike Goslinga (Dutch original here)

To understand the magnitude of what’s going on in South Korea, watch this short film by Jos De Putter (Dutch original here)

Eight years and 6,500 Obama photos later: How our view of the President has been meticulously crafted by Sterre Sprengers

Meet the greatest anti-poverty crusader you’ve never heard of by Sanne Blauw and Maite Vermeulen (Dutch original here)

A tree walks into a courtroom by Lynn Berger (Dutch original here)

This is the Berlin Wall of our time by Maite Vermeulen (Dutch original here)

After Brussels everything’s been said (except what almost everyone thinks) by Rob Wijnberg (Dutch original here)

How do you tell stories from a country that doesn’t want them told? by Lennart Hofman (Dutch original here)

Meet the most persecuted people in the world by Lennart Hofman (Dutch original here)

This is what goes wrong inside your head every day by Thalia Verkade (Dutch original here)

novels

Planet Paradroid: A psychedelic dark comedy about friendship, love, and the meaning of death (forthcoming; read a longer excerpt here and see the Dutch original here)

Tex had fallen asleep. A dreamlike, euphoric sleep, in which snowflakes gently floated, one by one, to the ground. Dancing alone in the dusky twilight, like tiny enchanting creatures, until they vanished into the white layer of ice that covered the concrete as if they had never existed. Finally. Together. At least they had that.

The Eagleton Seal (forthcoming; see Dutch original here)

The current slowly nudged long waves around craggy Fastnet Rock toward Ireland's southwest coast. Closer to shore, the shallow water hastened the waves along, and like a giant, snorting animal, the mass of black water rose up suddenly, twisting until the mighty wave crashed in white froth against the gray cliffs, chasing innumerable seagulls into the air, then sank back into the sea as a fine crystalline mist.

non-fiction books

Defusing Destructive Relationships: How to recognize psychopathy and contain its damage (forthcoming; see Dutch original here)

The psychopath's mental illness has all the outward signs of mental health. It’s this misleading ordinariness that reassures us, flatters us, draws us close as a friend or a lover, with the single goal of draining us dry and destroying us. Psychopathy is parasitism disguised as human kindness, innocence, fairness and reason, goodness, superiority, help, and needing help.

ASML's Architects: The story of the engineers who shaped the world's most powerful chip machines

At the start of the sixties, the Philips Physics Laboratory—Natlab for short—is a superuniversity where only the best and brightest are welcome. At its facility on Philips’ industrial campus in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, these whiz kids are free to conduct research under ideal conditions: they don’t have to teach class, and Natlab’s budgets are virtually unlimited.

Prowling the meanings of a word, prowling the history of a person, no use expecting a flood of light. Human words have no main switch. But all those little kidnaps in the dark. And then the luminous, big, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, barking web of them that hangs in your mind when you turn back to the page you were trying to translate.

—Anne Carson