I am an experienced (Austrian) German to (British) English translator focusing on financial market supervision law. For 25 years, I have worked with customers within the Austrian public and private sectors. I am involved in translation of all aspects of banking supervision and resolution – from the cradle (authorisation/licensing) to the grave (orderly wind-down in resolution) in-house since 2014.
I have translated a wide variety of primary and secondary Austrian legislation, soft law instruments, as well as web content and financial literacy information. I am LangTecha portmanteau for language technology, meaning assistive use of technology in relation to language processing tasks. More savvy, pre-dominantly as a power user of Trados and MultiTerm (since 2004) but I remain a strong advocate of the preservation of human translators and interpreters, to the extent of pushing for an Expert in the Lead (XITL)EITL/XITL advocates the expert human in the lead rather than in the loop. More approach from the side of the translation profession, rather than the industry’s preference towards MITLMachine in the loop is an approach to human/machine translation. Under Machine in the Loop, a human expert (i.e. a translator) makes use of computer-based tools to support them in the translation process. This approach contrasts “human in the loop” (HITL), which only has subordinate human involvement. HITL also does not state whether the human involved is necessary an expert. More or HITLHuman in the loop is an approach advocated by the translation industry, whereby machine translation is used and the role of human translators is secondary – e.g. doing some kind of post-editing. It has become particularly prevalent with the rise of LLMs. My issues with HITL is that it reduces the role of a human (with no mention of their More solutions.
I switched from freelancing to being an in-house translator in 2014 after fourteen years of specialist German-English translation as translator. I work in a government authority in Vienna, specialising in financial market supervision translation.
Having frequently condensed my thoughts through 140 and latterly 280 character tweets, I decided to move to blogging as a longer form of communication for conveying my thoughts about translation-related issues. I was previously on Twitter/X but deleted this in early 2025 and am now active on bluesky. as @mdgb.bsky.social.
I’ve studied quite a few Python courses, in particular to find ways of using it to help me with some tasks in relation to my work as a translator, and also completed a number of courses in Coursera as part of the Single Supervisory MechanismThe Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM), housed at the European Central Bank, has been operational since November 2014 and is the mechanism under which Europe’s largest banks are directly supervised by the European Central Bank – through Joint Supervisory Teams (JSTs) staffed by the European Central Bank and national competent authorities (NCAs). See the SSM Website for further information. More Data Science School initiative.