Ela Kremer – Translator

"Ela performed German-language editing as well as English-to-German translation work for us on multiple books. She was professional, responsive, and easy to work with. I highly recommend her as an editor and translator!"

—Andrew Watts, Severn River Publishing

I am a former German lawyer turned legal writer/translator turned passionate, meticulous, yet creative translator/editor ("transitor") of fiction and non-fiction copy. Put simply, I know how to make the right (word) choices to get your story across to a new market: the rather demanding German-speaking audience.

As a writer, I understand the importance of keeping the author's voice intact. Ultimately, my goal is to deliver your message/story and grow your readership in the DACH region!

I divide my time between working as a freelance lawyer-linguist for the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg, and 'transitoring' genre fiction. Mostly military thrillers and archaeological adventures, as well as a few heist stories and works of prose. In the future, I would like to take on some legal dramas, as these would play to my strengths and professional background.

How I work:

Until a few years ago, I would not even consider proofreading 'ghastly' machine translations because I found them to be of poor quality.

That was then. Content translation isn't what it used to be—CAT tools and translation systems have improved so much in recent years that I have come to change my approach. While the output I provide will always be a human translation, depending on the complexity of a given text, neural machine translation services can certainly produce a workable first draft. This is then validated against the source file sentence by sentence, word by word, and undergoes two thorough rounds of editing and proofreading. Every project is a quest for the best possible result: a natural-sounding and engaging translation.

An editor at heart, I used to revise and improve other people's German translations before realising that there had to be a better way of producing a proper German versions of popular English books. Most of the files I came across effectively needed rewriting. In fact, two out of four were almost raw machine translations submitted as human work. I am still waiting to be hired to copy edit/proofread a manually translated manuscript for which no additional work is required.

I therefore prefer to validate and line edit a decent, predictable machine translation (DeepL) and transform it into something beautiful and enticing!

BTW: I worked on the listed books as a translator/editor using the method outlined above, even though some of them credit other people as translators, i.e. the people who provided the German source files. However, once you have made over 66k changes to a 100k-word book, it can no longer be considered editing. The published versions showcase my work, and I have the receipts to prove it.