Profile

About me

I have always felt an affinity for the French language. Born in Saint John, New Brunswick (Canada’s only officially bilingual province), I moved to Montreal at age eleven, the second largest French-speaking city in the world. 

Travel and education

I attended Pomfret School in Connecticut, where I completed the two last years of high school and read my first novel in French, an abridged version of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. I went on to Tufts University, where I majored in French and took several courses in drama at Tufts Arena Theater. As part of that program, I lived for one year in Paris─a moveable feast─where I attended the Sorbonne Nouvelle and studied acting and body movement at Atelier Alain Illel in the Marais. That same year I undertook my first literary translation, a French adaptation of Canadian singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot’s If You Could Read My Mind. After graduating from Tufts magna cum laude, I spent four months in West Berlin, studying German at the Goethe Institute and tutoring French to adults. Upon returning to Montreal, I earned a Master of Arts in French language and literature at McGill University and completed a year of coursework for the doctorate.

Teaching and translation

After teaching high school for a year, I obtained a teaching certificate at the Université de Montréal and taught French in elementary school for five years, going on to teach English as a second language to scientists at the National Research Council of Canada. I began studying translation at night and received a translation certificate from McGill University, appearing on the Dean’s List. I then moved to Ottawa, where I earned a Master of Arts in Translation from the School of Translation and Interpretation at the University of Ottawa and completed a year of coursework for a doctorate. 

Literary and fine arts translation

I published my first literary translation in 1999 while under contract with the Canada Border Services Agency.

     After ten years in Ottawa, I moved back to Montreal and have since focused increasingly on literary translation. I won a French Voices Award from the Cultural Services of the French Embassy New York to translate La Vie extérieure / Things Seen by Annie Ernaux, who in 2022 received the Nobel Prize for her body of work. 

     I have translated several highly reputed Québec authors including Hélène Dorion, Lise Gauvin, Louis-Philippe Hébert, Hélène Rioux and Lise Tremblay. In addition, I published two translations with McGill-Queen’s University Press: Jean-Pierre Le Glaunec’s The Cry of Vertières: Liberation, Memory and the Beginning of Haiti and Henri Ellenberger’s Ethnopsychiatry, critical edition by Emmanuel Delille.

     I have also considerable experience translating texts for museums and art galleries, including The National Gallery (Ottawa), the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, the McCord Museum (Montreal), the Atelier Alain Piroir (Montreal), the Musée d’art singulier contemporain (Mansonville, Quebec), the Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec (Quebec City) and the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia (Halifax).

     More recently I translated the libretto of an opera (surtitles) by Hélène Dorion and the late Marie-Claire Blais. Yourcenar : Une île des passions was staged by the Opéra de Montréal in August 2022. My latest foray is into youth fiction. I had the honour of translating for Orca Books (British Columbia) Like a Hurricane by Jonathan Bécotte, which in French was finalist for the Governor General Award.

     I have been a member of the Literary Translators’ Association of Canada for over twenty-four years, serving on its executive for a total of nine years.