Sylvia Smith
Sylvia Smith is a freelance translator and copywriter specialized in engineering, economics, and finance.
Originally from Houston, Texas, she holds a Bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering and an MBA from London Business School. Sylvia began translating in Paris, drawing on her industry-specific knowledge todeliver on-target financial reports and marketing communications. She was a founding partner of SFM Traduction, a boutique translation and copywriting firm serving businesses in the finance and technology sectors. From 2015–2020, Sylvia was an in-house financial translator at Banque Cantonale Vaudoise (BCV) in Lausanne, Switzerland. There she gained an insider’s view of the strategic role that translation can play in an organization’s communications and positioning.
In 2021 she became a partner of Lausanne-based Scala Wells, now Scala Smith, an English-language communications firm. There, she provides high-end translation and copywriting services to local businesses and public-sector seeking to bolster their presence on the international stage.
Sylvia has spoken at a number of translation industry conferences, including the Université d’été de la traduction financière (UETF) in Spiez (2017 and 2019) and Brussels (2018). She has also given workshops for the Swiss Association of Translation, Terminology, and Interpreting (ASTTI) and the Vaud Chamber of Commerce and Industry (CVCI).
Laurence Cuzzolin
Laurence Cuzzolin grew up in a Franco-Italian-German environment, and set herself an early mission: to make communication flow—within her family, and across borders, cultures, professions, and social worlds.
She spent 20 years at Trado Verso, the Paris-based translation cooperative she co-founded, where
collaborative practice and rigorous cross-revision set a high bar for technical and editorial translation.
“Corporate magazines were definitely my thing,” she says. Her projects ranged from institutional
publications—particularly on agricultural development and fisheries for the OECD and FAO—to corporate
communications in fields as varied as architectural lighting, air traffic control, transport and tourism.
Since relocating to Bremen, northern Germany, in 2020, she has worked as a freelance translator and
copywriter, and still enjoys projects that bring collaborative teams together. Today she focuses on the environment, sustainable development, and CSR, with a particular flair for marketing texts.
Chris Durban
Chris Durban is a freelance translator (French to English) based in Paris, where she specializes in publication-level texts for demanding clients.
Her client portfolio includes some of Europe’s top corporations as well as regulatory and regional development agencies, with a focus on high-profile, high-visibility and high-risk situations in business strategy, investor relations and financial/corporate communications.
A longstanding member of SFT (France) and a Fellow of ITI (UK), Chris is also a co-founder and co-organizer of SFT’s summer school for financial translator (UETF), as well as the Translate in… series of seminars for translators keen to hone their writing skills—held over the years in upstate New York, Quebec, Chantilly, Cambridge and Charlevoix, with an online edition during Covid.
Chris has written many articles about translation, targeting both peers and clients, and has given talks and workshops around the world. She is co-author of two books: The Prosperous Translator and 101 Things a Translator Needs to Know. She is a former board member and president of SFT, and also served on the board of ATA (USA). She translates almost every day, and enjoys it immensely.
Grant Hamilton
A Canadian translator, copywriter and published author, Grant Hamilton ran his own translation company for many years in Quebec City, Canada, specialising in advertising and marketing. Called Anglocom, it is now a division of TRSB, where Grant works as a senior linguist.
Grant is also very active in training. A veteran of the “Translate in” series of conferences, he was the chief organizer all five times the event took place in Quebec. Translate in Dublin will be his ninth participation as an instructor. He is also a regular trainer for Magistrad and Quebec’s order of certified translators, OTTIAQ.
Previously, Grant was chief organizer of three conferences for the Translation Company Division of the American Translators Association, in 2009, 2010 and 2011. He also won ATA’s Alicia Gordon Award for Creativity in Translation in 2009 and taught advertising adaptation for six years as a lecturer in New York University’s translation certificate program.
Daniel Hahn
Daniel Hahn is a translator, writer and editor, with about a hundred books to his name. Publications in 2026 include If This Be Magic (a non-fiction book about Shakespeare in translation), The Penguin Book of Brazilian Short Stories (forthcoming, co-edited with Padma Viswanathan), and translations of fiction from Guatemala, Argentina, Mexico, Brazil and Peru. He is currently translating a non-fiction book about the collapse of the Soviet Union.
“One way or another, most of my work involves books. I write them, translate them, edit them and review them. (I also used to work in a shop selling them.) I work with writers, publishers and book festivals, and with a range of organisations that support literature, reading and free expression.”
Dominique Jonkers
Dominique Jonkers has been a freelance translator from English and Dutch into French since 1997. He also heads Jonkers & Partners, a translation company specializing in high-end financial and business texts. After earning an MBA, he spent 15 years in corporate banking before transitioning to translation in 1997. Since 2000, he has focused exclusively on texts related to his areas of specialization, deliberately avoiding generalist work.
A native Dutch speaker raised and educated in francophone Belgium, Dominique draws on his dual cultural background to craft strategic texts for financial institutions, businesses, and international organizations. He combines deep expertise in economics and finance with a strong commitment to clarity, convinced that true subject-matter mastery is essential to effective writing.
A sought-after trainer and conference speaker, he encourages translators to position themselves as linguistic consultants, going beyond the words on the page to deliver real value. Dominique has also translated four books and, in 2011, received the the Pierre-François Caillé Award for literary translation from SFT, France’s national association for professional translators.
Marc Lambert
Marc Lambert has been active as a translator, editor, educator and speaker for over 30 years. He believes translators should be writers first. He attended McGill University and Université de Montréal, and began working in 1987.
Marc started in translation agencies where he spent 9 years before working 10 years as an independent translator. He then joined in-house Translation Departments, spending 5 years with KPMG and 8 years with CPA Canada. He started teaching for Magistrad in 2012. He has been giving seminars at “Translate in…” conferences since 2013 (Quebec, France, United Kingdom).
Marc was a speaker at several translation conferences (American Translators Association – ATA and Ordre des traducteurs, terminologues et interprètes agréés du Québec – OTTIAQ). He has published pieces in “Circuit,” OTTIAQ’s magazine, and in “À Propos: FLD Newsletter” (ATA).
François Lavallée
François Lavallée earned a bachelor’s degree from Université Laval in 1985, and has since devoted his career to the pursuit of idiomatic translation. Lavallée has written three books chronicling this quest: Le traducteur averti (2005) (over 5,000 copies sold), Le traducteur encore plus averti (2016) and Au-delà du traducteur averti (2022). In 2006, he founded Magistrad, where he teaches a variety of courses, including La traduction administrative… idiomatique!, attended by more than 1,700 participants so far. He also taught at Université Laval from 2002 to 2018.
After 20 years as a freelancer, Lavallée served as Vice-President of Training and Quality at translation firm Edgar from 2009 to 2023. In 2021, he was named an honorary member of the Ordre des traducteurs, terminologues et interprètes du Québec (OTTIAQ).
Miriam Watchorn
Miriam Watchorn MA, MATII, MCIOL has over 30 years’ experience as a freelance translator,
working mainly from French to English. A graduate of Lille University, France, and Dublin
City University, Ireland, she also holds a postgraduate Diploma in Translation (Chartered
Institute of Linguists, London, UK), and a Master’s in Translation Studies (DCU).
She is an ATII Certified Legal Translator and specialises in legal and financial translation
with a broad and diverse range of translation experience and interests. She lectures in
translation studies at Dublin City University, Ireland.
She has worked with many major international companies and institutions, including the
European Commission and the European Court of Justice of the European Union, RIDA,
Légifrance, Juriscope, IRJS/Sorbonne and Aix-Marseille University.
Caroline Tremblay
Caroline Tremblay has been passionate about language as a tool for expression and communication since early childhood. She holds a degree in translation from Université Laval (2003) and a degree in sociolinguistics from the University of Sherbrooke (2009).
Over the course of her career, she has worked as a freelancer, a civil servant, and a salaried employee at a small translation agency in the private sector. She also taught translation, copywriting, and revision at the university level from 2012 to 2019. She later joined Magistrad as an instructor and now serves as a training coordinator.
Her areas of expertise include comparative translation, translation for effective communication, and gender-neutral language in translation (feminization).
Anne de Freyman
Anne de Freyman is an English to French translator. She left her native Provence after her MA in the late 80s and settled in Yorkshire, where still lives now. She started working as a translator when floppy disks were the height of technology and never looked back. She works mostly in international development, directly for the OECD and other international organisations.
Anne is also an avid and experienced knitter, which led her to embrace a rather unlikely combination of specialisms when she was approached to translate The Vogue Knitting Book (La grande encyclopédie du tricot). Faced with the editor’s instruction to use the masculine gender throughout and frequently recurring instances of the word ‘knitters’, she made it her mission to find all the possible ways of not using the word ‘tricoteurs’. Which led to a true obsession with gender-neutral writing.
