Selected Translations
From 2002 through 2019 I worked as a freelance translator from Dutch into American English. This is a small sample of that work. All links are external. All works are protected by copyright and not subject to the license I use elsewhere on this site. Excerpts shown here in accordance with fair use law.
Novels
Planet Paradroid: A psychedelic dark comedy about friendship, love, and the meaning of death
by PJ Pancras
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
by Arjen Terpstra
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
ASML’s Architects: The story of the engineers who shaped the world’s most powerful chip machines
by René Raaijmakers
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.
The Road to Integration: A Guide to Applying the ISA-95 Standard in Manufacturing
by Bianca Scholten
ERP systems are only valuable if you supply them with current data, and these data originate largely from the PCS layer… Users of ERP systems think, “Boy, the system really produces terrific reports,” but they don’t realize that their colleagues at the “bottom” are busy entering all these data by hand.
Defusing Destructive Relationships: How to recognize psychopathy and contain its damage
by Jan Storms
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.
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)