David Bellos

David Bellos studied Modern Languages at Oxford and taught French in the UK before moving to Princeton in 1997, where he served as Director of the Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication for more than ten years. He stumbled into a second career as a translator when he became enthralled by Georges Perec’s Life A User’s Manual. He has translated roughly a book a year ever since, in fields ranging from popular fiction to the history of anti-Semitism, and from the history of counting systems to masterpieces of modern Albanian literature. His teaching, experience and frustration with the state of translation studies led him to write Is That a Fish in Your Ear? The Amazing Adventure of Translation, which has itself been translated into French, German, Spanish, Russian, Korean, Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese.