Translation

I began occasional work as a casual translator of French and German articles in the later 1970s, in the 1980s also introducing the work of Wilhelm Hennis and Reinhart Koselleck to an anglophone audience through the translation of collections of their essays.  These commissions came about simply because I was interested in their work, but I also continued to do other work when asked.  Once I had left Keele University in 2002 I turned to translation projects as a regular source of income, and in 2005 formally established Klartext as my translation company, regularising my status as a professional translator.

Since then I have completed a range of commissions for Palgrave, Polity Press, Princeton University Press, Oxford University Press and Hackett.  More recently I have translated Wilfried Nippel’s Ancient or Modern Liberty? for Cambridge University Press, and in the summer of 2016 my new translation of Schiller’s Aesthetic Education was published by Penguin, edited by Alexander Schmidt.

In 2017 I completed my new translation of Weber’s Economy and Society, published in April 2019 by Harvard University Press. Although my new status as a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Tartu limits my time for translation for the next five years, I am prepared to consider shorter pieces of editing or translation work.  In any case, the linking of translation projects to publisher and funding can take time, and I am always open to new and interesting proposals.  In particular, I have recently begun translation from Italian into English, collaborating with Isaac Nakhimovsky of Yale University on a translation of Fichte writing about Machiavelli, involving a three-way co-ordination of English, Italian and German.  I would welcome any further proposals for translations from Italian.