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 myself, I know how important it is to keep the author's voice intact. Ultimately, I want to deliver your message/story and grow your readership in the DACH region!

While I continue to work as a freelance lawyer-linguist for the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg, in recent years I have concentrated on translating and editing genre fiction. Mostly military thrillers and a few heist stories. In the future, I would like to take on some legal dramas, as this would play to my strengths and professional background.

How I work:

Up until a few years ago, I strictly refused to even proofread "ghastly" machine translations, as their quality was less than convincing.

That was then. Translating content isn't what it used to be - CAT tools and at least one translation system have improved so much in recent years that they have changed 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 provide 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. Each 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 version of popular English books. Most of the files I came across effectively needed rewriting. Two out of four were almost raw machine translations submitted as human work. I have not yet been hired as an editor/proofreader and do nothing more than the title suggests.

Hence I prefer to validate/translate/edit - call it what you may - a decent machine translation (DeepL) any day and turn 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. And, yes, they provided the German source files. However, when you make more than 66k necessary changes to a 100k-word book, you can no longer call it editing. The published versions show my work, and I have the receipts.