About myself – Curriculum vitae
Dr Arnim Mennecke – Freelance translator and copy editor in Kiel
After a five-year interlude as an employed translator, I am again working as a freelance translator and copy editor based in the harbour city of Kiel on the German Baltic coast. I concentrate on text types that do not lend themselves easily to being translated with the help of TM or MT: Non-fiction, scientific, scholarly or journalistic articles, presentations, press releases. I specialise in humanities and social science as well as technology and natural science.
Employment as a translator with a language service provider
As an employed translator working for a language service provider (from 2013 to 2018) I got to know the translation business from the perspective of an agency: Using diverse TM systems, I translated texts from a large number of clients in many specialist fields. Towards the end of that time, post-editing of machine-translated documents was beginning to play an ever more important role. A formative and instructive experience, indeed.
Freelance translator and copy editor in Brunswick, Hamburg, Durham and Kiel
From 1992 to 2013 (with an interruption) I worked as a freelance translator and copy editor, starting out in Brunswick, later moving to Hamburg, Durham (UK) and finally to Kiel. My customers were largely translation agencies in the U.S.A, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and also in Switzerland (see references), but I also had a number of end clients.
Freelance work for academic institutions in Brunswick
During 1992/93, while I was already self-employed, I carried out freelance work for projects that had their origin in my previous employment as a Junior Lecturer at the Technical University of Brunswick. For the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research, for example, I did research on xenophobia in school textbooks, and as an external lecturer at the English Department of the Technical University of Brunswick, I conducted seminars in English Literature.
Junior lecturer at the Technical University of Brunswick
As a junior lecturer at the Department of Educational Science at the Technical University of Brunswick, I was involved, from 1990 to 1992, with a German-English project dedicated to the analysis and assessment of cultural contents in textbooks for foreign language teaching, and I also gave seminar courses in English Literature.
Studies and Doctorate
From 1985 to 1989, as part of my work for a PhD thesis on the South African novelist (and later Nobel laureate-to-be), J.M. Coetzee, I intensively studied, among other things, the psychology of racism (see publications below).
In 1984, I concluded my studies in English and German at the Technical University of Brunswick (which included two terms abroad as a guest student at Emmanuel College in Cambridge) with a thesis on the South African novelist (and later Nobel laureate), Nadine Gordimer.
Publications
Koloniales Bewußtsein in den Romanen J.M. Coetzees [Colonial Consciousness in the Novels of J.M. Coetzee] (Anglistische Forschungen 215), Heidelberg 1991 [PhD thesis, Brunswick 1989].
„Überlegungen zur Bewertung landeskundlicher Inhalte in fremdsprachlichen Lehrwerken“ [Considerations on evaluating cultural content in textbooks for foreign language teaching], in: Peter Doyé, ed., Großbritannien. Seine Darstellung in Schulbüchern für den Englischunterricht [Great Britain. Its Representation in Textbooks for Teaching English in Germany], Frankfurt 1991.
„Nachwort“ [Afterword], ibid.
„Nicht-linguistische Inhalte in Lehrwerken und interpretative Lehrwerkkritik“ [An interpretive approach to the assessment of non-linguistic content in textbooks], in:
Manfred Erdmenger, ed., Englisch lernen – die Welt begreifen [Learning English – Comprehending the World] (Festschrift for Peter Doyé), Braunschweig 1992.
„Limits and Potentialities of Textbooks for Teaching Cultural Awareness and International Understanding” in Michael Byram, ed., Germany. Its Representation in Textbooks for Teaching German in Great Britain, Frankfurt 1993.
Contributions to K.-Peter Fritzsche et. al. Schulbücher gegen Fremdenfeindlichkeit? Ein Forschungsbericht [Textbooks against Xenophobia? A survey], in: Internationale Schulbuchforschung 15. 1993 (H.2/3).