Ginger A. Diekmann is a copyeditor and proofreader for the English language and a translator of German into English. Originally from northern California, where she graduated with a double major in English Literature and German Studies from San Francisco State University (1991, summa cum laude), she began her career in publishing and the media as a news assistant and editor at the news release service Business Wire in San Francisco (1991–1994). After a move to upstate New York, where she studied cultural and social anthropology at Cornell University (MA, 1997) and began to acclimate to hard winters, Ginger moved to Berlin in the fall of 1997. There she took up a position as an editor and translator for the secretariat of the European Employment Observatory (1997–1999), and has been copyediting, translating, and proofreading her way through the Berlin winters and glorious summers ever since.

As a copyeditor, Ginger works primarily on scholarly multi-contributor volumes and individual articles and reports in the humanities, social sciences, and the arts. She specializes in editing texts by academics and researchers whose native language is not English. The topics of the twenty-some books she has copyedited include divorce and marital litigation in Counter-Reformation Venice, organizational learning and knowledge, concepts and uses of the gift in medieval Europe, trends in labor market forecasting, and the cultural history of the viol (see List of Recent Projects). She has been an Advanced Member of the Society for Editors and Proofreaders, London, since 2002.

Ginger also translates in areas of the humanities and social sciences, particularly employment and social policy, labor market research, cultural history, and modern and contemporary art. Textual forays since her move to Berlin include her service as one of two translators for the EXPO 2000 Hannover International Broadcasting Center, a daily news service for print and broadcast media; her translation of a collection of essays in an exhibition catalogue by the artist Christian Boltanski; and the conception, research, and writing of the 2003 Langenscheidt Sprachkalender Englisch, an English-language day-by-day calendar with exercises for learners, which incorporated useful information, trivia, and cultural themes.

Tel./Fax: +49 (0)30 / 440 42 426

contact: diekmann(@)inter-alia.de