About

I began my journey in translation long before it became my career. It began when I left the United States in 1983 to live in Costa Rica.

I didn’t speak, read, or write Spanish when I arrived, but I had to learn quickly. We bought a piece of farmland and cows, opened bank accounts, and had to deal with many legal and financial tasks. Each day, as I communicated with the local people, I would carry my Spanish dictionary with me everywhere I went. I would look up the words I needed and then write them down on a small piece of paper that I kept in my pocket (no smartphones or computers). As the months passed, the list of words I needed to know on that paper got smaller and smaller until one day I didn’t need it anymore.

My partner and I ran a successful dairy for many years. We purchased more adjacent pastureland and 20 hectares of primary and secondary tropical forests during that time. Shortly after, we quit the cattle business and allowed all the land (40 hectares) to regenerate.

A New Chapter

In tropical latitudes, trees grow at an exponential rate. We never foresaw what happened on that 40 hectares after we removed the livestock and land management. Within two years, some trees were up to 3 meters tall, vines, orchids, understory, and a small canopy of the fastest-growing trees that protected the seedlings of slower-growing hardwoods. And with this, many, many birds of all kinds, small mammals, several family troops of howler monkeys, sloths, reptiles, and amphibians.

I was so amazed by what I witnessed, and there was a lot of tourism in my area, that I began offering guided tours called “the forest walk” with me as a guide. Visitors were amazed as I led them through the primary, secondary, and regenerated forests. They couldn’t believe how quickly the forest and wildlife recover in the tropics.

Witnessing this, I thought, “Why not start a small non-profit and incentivize other farmland owners to reforest parts of their land.” The organization was named La Reserva Forest Foundation (LRFF), and we managed to plant over 150,000 native trees on 150 hectares of privately owned farmland and indigenous reserves in Northern Costa Rica.

I hosted many interns from around the world who were inspired by what we were accomplishing. In 2012, toward the end of my work as the founder and CEO of LRFF, I was in a bad financial situation. Honestly, I needed to get a real job where I could earn an income. All the years I’d dedicated to the non-profit were unpaid, donated labor. The intern working with me suggested I register with a translation agency she knew of. That was in 2012. The agency was One Hour Translation.

Success

The work started out slow. I was a freelance translator with no formal experience, but I’d always been an excellent student of English. I began to receive translation projects slowly, but within two years, I was fairly busy. In those days, the agency’s slogan was “only human translation.” Machine translation was strictly prohibited. But after a few years, they began to incorporate more and more machine translation with human editing, which was a way to provide cost savings to some customers.

Blend Localization, formerly One Hour Translation, has been my savior. They gave me a chance, and I took it and ran. I became their #1 Spanish-to-English translator within four years. Early on, I became the exclusive translator for Fairway Independent Mortgage Corporation, one of the largest mortgage companies in the U.S. To this day, I have translated thousands of projects and millions of words for them. More recently, I became a legal translator for another huge Blend customer, Live Nation Entertainment, translating hundreds of thousands of words for their Latin American partners.

With the advent of AI in the translation field, many questions come to mind. I wondered about the safety of using AI and machine translation for sensitive personal data, such as financial and legal documents. After doing a little research, I found that this is indeed an issue with AI. I read horror stories of loan and title companies inputting a client’s information into an AI system and that client losing everything due to the ease with which personal data can be accessed in AI systems.

Quality is a priority for me, so rather than pursue MT/AI, I decided to study for one year and take the American Translators Certification exam. If I passed, I could distinguish myself in that way.

My intention is not to compete with agencies but to offer clients secure, certified human translations when it is of utmost importance to get the translation right and ensure the safe handling of personal data. I even offer machine translation with human editing here for marketing and other low-confidentiality content.

It’s been an amazing journey. One never knows where life will take them until they connect the dots after the fact. I can attest to that.