My 30+ years as a business professional in marketing, writing, translating, transcreation and project and vendor management have included professional experience with international and domestic language service providers, marketing and advertising agencies, my own freelance translation, transcreation and transcription company, product suppliers, manufacturing companies, airlines, travel agencies, universities, a television station and language services providers.

As the oldest daughter of a Mexican mother and an American father, I discovered my love for and ease in learning languages as a toddler and child during our family’s travels to Mexico to visit our relatives. I lived with one family of relatives for a year as a teen and attended high school in Mexico. I returned to the USA fluent in Spanish and then began studying French.

My talent with languages helped me at the University of Illinois, where I earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in French Language and Literature. I also studied German, Italian, and Russian. I spent a summer living with a French family in Avignon, France, attending summer school and attaining fluency in French. I also traveled throughout France and Italy.

I went on to earn an M.B.A. in International Management from Thunderbird – American Graduate School of International Management in Glendale, Arizona, where I managed to sneak in some language courses even though I had already tested out of the school's language requirement.

I began my professional career in direct marketing account management at a large agency in San Francisco, continuing with a transfer to the agency's Frankfurt am Main, Germany, subsidiary, where I developed and managed international direct marketing campaigns. Also during my four years living and working in Germany, I worked as a marketing analyst and started offering my translation and editing freelance services from German, French, Spanish and Italian into English.

After my return to the United States, I worked for more than seven years for a major international airline and held various positions in passenger reservations, sales promotion, marketing program development and implementation, promotional writing, sales analysis, web site content writing, airport customer service supervision, training manual writing, and group sales. I then spent several years working in corporate travel.

As a program manager for several certificate programs in business at a state university extension in California, I created, implemented and managed courses and certificate programs, wrote catalog and marketing copy, recruited and hired instructors, and reviewed student applications for acceptance. At another state university in California, I assisted the Executive Vice Chancellor & Provost of a brand new university with recruitment and hiring of professors and department chairs.

With a manufacturer of packaging machinery located in central California, I managed international and domestic marketing, advertising, public relations, trade show participation, and sales promotion for several years. I also wrote and edited technical manuals and operational guides in English and Spanish.

After moving to upstate New York, I worked for several years for a television station in creative services, writing and producing public service announcements, coordinating events, writing and editing web site copy, and managing appearances by on-air talent. I then worked for several years as a project manager/vendor manager for a language services provider.

After leaving the LSP, I continued my freelance work, though now full-time, in translation, transcreation, editing and proofreading services. Throughout my 30+ years of translation and related experience, I have done many different kinds of work with many different kinds of subjects and texts, including:

• Translation from German into English of a 200+ page book about a German family's history from the 1600s to the present day
• Transcription of several episodes of a French television program, which I then translated into English
• Transcription of an hour-long radio interview in Spanish, which I then translated into English
• Transcription of over 16 hours of Spanish seminar recordings, which I then translated into English
• Transcription of numerous legal and medical dictations, speeches, and presentations in English
• German to English translations and transcreations of countless types of documents, including:
- engineering reports on road construction projects
- print advertisements and other kinds of marketing collateral
- museum acquisition and loan reports
- adoption legal documents and reports
- birth, marriage, death, school and other certificates
- two novels from Italian to English
- one travel/fishing guide from German to English
• Translations of survey questions and responses; technical and training manuals; newspaper and magazine articles; many, many other types of documents from all of my languages into English
• Proofreading of promotional collateral for extremely large, well-known companies in English, French and Spanish

I also have over 20 years of project management experience, as part of my responsibilities in most of the professional positions I have held, managing projects from the smallest 2-hour projects to multi-state mega-events and promotions, involving several US states' tourist bureaus, airline operations, hundreds of target businesses and thousands of target end consumers, and lasting over several days.

In addition to my professional work, I have also written more than 30 short stories, and I am currently working on a memoir and three novels...not all at the same time. (I get bored quickly!)