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Having completed my degree at the University of Zurich, I began my professional life working with a corporate publishing agency, where I collaborated in a variety of capacities on publications created for companies such as Swissair, Gate Gourmet, Swiss Re, Swiss Life, PricewaterhouseCoopers and UBS.

My tasks in corporate publishing include translation, editing and journalism. In the latter discipline, I am particularly in demand for portraits of important management personalities, combining my knowledge of the corporate world – having been employed as a translator for a management consultant, a bank and an insurer – with my skills as a linguist and an informed, attentive listener in order to show the human side of my interviewees. These have ranged from the Director of Christie’s Europe to the entire secretarial department at PricewaterhouseCoopers’s Zurich offices. I have frequently conducted interviews in German and Italian, producing the final article in English.

My background as an accomplished musician and art historian has also informed my work in corporate publishing and sponsorship, particularly when interviewing artists such as pianist Vladimir Ashkenazy, film director Roman Polanski, flautist James Galway or violinist Christian Tetzlaff, writing articles about corporate-sponsored art exhibitions, editing artistic publications for a credit card company, or translating a series of books about on-site art for a major bank.

A lifelong love of art predestined me to work in this field, and having studied German, Italian and Art History at the University of Zurich, using my language skills in combination with my training as an art historian was a natural progression. My first art-related assignment was as part of a team translating a major exhibition catalogue for Munich’s Haus der Kunst – Der Glanz der Farnese – from Italian into German.

I have collaborated with the Swiss Institute for Art Research since 1998, translating several museum publications, including books on the Kunstmuseum Basel, Zurich’s Museum Rietberg and the Zentrum Paul Klee, Berne, as well as approximately 50 specialist articles from German and French into English for www.sikart.ch, the Institute’s authoritative online lexicon of Swiss artists.

Other institutions for which I have translated catalogues and books include New York’s The Frick Collection, for which I adapted German and French texts in its publication on 18th-century Swiss artist Jean-Étienne Liotard, as well as several galleries and art publications in Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Liechtenstein and the United Kingdom. I have also written about art for corporate publications, such as an article about a sale of works by Picasso at Christie’s in New York, and a comparative exhibition of works by Louise Bourgeois shown at the Fondation Beyeler, Riehen.

My thoroughly musical education makes me an exceptionally qualified translator and writer in the world of classical music. Having played the piano since the age of six, I attended a choir school for five years, where I was taught piano and organ by Roger Judd. I also learned the cello, playing in two school orchestras throughout my education. My piano training continued under Ronald Smith, and later in Zurich under Zsuszanna Sirokay.

Attending a performance of Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier at the age of nine kindled my passion for opera. I have produced many translations for Zurich Opera House – starting in 1998 with the newly inaugurated Zurich Festival, continuing with marketing texts, synopses, and the annual Season Book, as well as producing English surtitles for approximately 140 opera productions. Other clients in the realm of opera include the Salzburg Festival, for which I translated highly demanding pieces such as Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier and  Die Liebe der Danae as well as texts for the Salzburg Whitsun Festival under the artistic direction of Cecilia Bartoli. My sur-/subtitles have been seen in Salzburg, at the Semperoper Dresden and the Staatstheater Karlsruhe, as well as on Austrian television channel ORF and the Salzburg Festival’s 2015 DVD of Beethoven’s Fidelio.

I also work regularly for orchestras, and have translated more than 30 CD booklets for the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich – ranging from Mahler’s ten symphonies to Beethoven’s Violin Concerto with Christian Tetzlaff, from Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps to orchestral works by Messiaen. Among several projects for the Luzerner Sinfonieorchester, I translated and edited the booklet for the ensemble’s 2020 Gramophone award-winning Rachmaninoff in Lucerne CD. Other clients in the world of music include the Musikkollegium Winterthur, the Bern Symphony Orchestra and the Zurich Chamber Orchestra as well as pianist Teo Georghiu and harpsichordist Vital Julian Frey.

Being a person with a lively curiosity and an appreciation for life’s pleasures – however simple – a wide variety of lifestyle themes come naturally to me.

Seven years on the editorial team of the Swissair Gazette in the late 1990s involved writing, commissioning, editing and translating texts not only about airline-related themes, but also about anything from grand hotels to vintage luggage, healthy eating to international etiquette, the vineyards of Lake Geneva to fine jewellery.

I have since written, translated and adapted many interior design texts in both English and German for books and magazines, a yearbook for Design Hotels, articles on Art Deco jewels and international jewellery auctions, as well as marketing materials for high-end watch brands. Travel articles, a tongue-in-cheek “what-to-wear” text for a banking magazine, websites for Zurich Tourism and other Swiss destinations, as well as “transcreating” French to English marketing texts for a luxury chocolate manufacturer are just some of the assignments I have completed.