I became fascinated with languages as a young boy listening to Mexican migrant workers converse in a language I certainly didn't understand. I remember thinking of how smart they had to be to be able to communicate in a language that seemed impenetrable to me at the time. Fast forward to my professional life. That childhood curiosity and fascination with Spanish led me to study languages in high school and college, serve as a Spanish-speaking missionary for my church, and find ways to live abroad to truly immerse myself in other languages and cultures so I could become fluent in more than English. This ultimately led me to a career as a professional communicator. 

 

I have worked as a conference interpreter for more than 25 years. I spent 15 years as a professor of translation and interpreting first at American University in Washington, D.C. and later at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey (MIIS), where I trained generations of interpreters and translators, many of whom now work for the United Nations and in diplomatic services like the U.S. State Department. During my time at MIIS I also served as co-president of InterpretAmerica from 2009 to 2020. Always up for a challenge, in 2020, I resigned my professorship to join a multilingual videoconferencing SaaS startup that was in hypergrowth mode at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic to establish and scale up its client success team. You can read more about why I made such a bold move in an article I published here.  

 

Now, after almost three years in the startup world, I am breaking out as an independent language and technology consultant. public speaker and, you guessed it, interpreter (Old habits are hard to break, especially when you love them). You can learn about the unique services I offer here. Throughout my career first in the public sector, then in academia, and most recently the tech startup world, there has been one thread tying together all that I have done. And that thread is language and a passion (I know that word has become cliché, but there really is no other word that truly describes how I feel) for helping the world communicate.