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.

Therefore, I prefer to validate and line edit a decent, predictable machine translation (such as DeepL) and transform it into something beautiful and enticing.

After all, when AI translates, a human is needed to clean up the mess!