User:CWO

I discovered Wikipedia from searches for information in Google that repeatedly showed results in Wikipedia. After reading a number of articles and discovering what the nature of Wikipedia is, I realised that my own professional skills of proofreading, editing and, as a native speaker of English, translating from German into English and revising non-native English – as well as my own tendency to “flaunt knowledge” (as a friend teasingly put it, resulting in my doing it all the more with him) in the right circumstances – could be of use to, and find a creative outlet in, Wikipedia. I am still (November 2006) learning how to transfer my skills into the format of Wikipedia pages.

As a translator, I hold the standard British qualification, the Institute of Linguists Diploma in Translation (in my case, from German into English), and I am particularly interested in translating from the humanities, which was one of the semi-specialist papers I did in the Diploma examination. (This is not an attempt to solicit paid work, but rather a statement that I was trained to do, and am qualified in, a skill that Wikipedia's own guidance to potential translators describes as “hard”. Indeed, one of the advantages of not doing this to try to make money is the freedom to be entirely arbitrary about what I choose to translate.) My interests in reading are mainly in European (which also includes English) and American literature, and in the minutiae of European culture to be found, for example, in the combination of information about history, geography, literature, ethnography, languages and politics that one finds in such books as Journey through Europe by John Hillaby, Time of Gifts and Beyond the Woods and the Water by Patrick Leigh Fermor, Black Sea by Neal Ascherson, Europe by Norman Davies and Danube by Claudio Magris. From 1998 to 2004, I lived in the best-preserved Roman city north of the Alps, Trier (Germany), and since then I have lived in Sheffield (England).

I am, as it happens, male and British. Having been born in 1952, I was fortunate to be educated at a time in those pre-Word days when there was no prompting (unless one switches it off) to dumb down a “long sentence” or the “use of the passive” voice and when the ability to write well – grammatically and orthographically accurately; lucidly and, if necessary, cogently; interestingly but without showiness – was seen as part of being an educated person. I wish I could say that I was convinced that it still is seen as such in Britain.CWO 09:06, 7 November 2006 (UTC)