About me
With extensive research and teaching experience in the social sciences and the humanities and not just fluency in German and French, but a firm grasp of the conventions of specifically academic writing in German and French, I have been doing scholarly translations for the last two decades.
A native New Yorker, I have also lived, studied and taught in Germany, France, Belgium and Spain. I also offer Spanish-English translation services.
I hold a PhD in Philosophy with a minor in Economics from the New School for Social Research in New York and a first combined degree in Literature, History and Philosophy. I also studied at the Committee on Social Thought of the University of Chicago and was a DAAD fellow at the Free University of Berlin. In addition to teaching posts in the USA, I was a visiting scholar in Economics at the Open University in the United Kingdom and a visiting professor of Political Philosophy at the Ecole Normale Supérieure of Lyon.
My own scholarly work has always been heavily interdisciplinary in orientation, spanning across philosophy, economics, political science, history, international relations, international law, and cultural studies.
In addition to my academic career, I also worked as a journalist and political analyst covering European politics and transatlantic relations. I have contributed to leading publications on international affairs such as Policy Review and World Affairs, and I was European corresponding editor for the news site World Politics Review, where I also ran a translation series featuring regular translations from the international press.
I have not only published two books and hundreds of articles in English, I have also published in German and French in leading intellectual journals such as Merkur and Les Temps Modernes.
Recent Book Translations:
Carl Christian von Weizsäcker and Hagen Krämer, Saving and Investment in the Twenty-First Century: The Great Divergence (Springer, 2021).
Jean-François Pirson, Pratiques de territoire (Territorial Practices) (Cellule architecture – Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles, 2020) – bilingual French-English edition.
Testimonials
John Rosenthal is a translator of rare talent. His profound knowledge of both German and English and his willingness and ability to truly understand the intentions behind my texts and to bring them into English played a crucial role in my being able to establish myself as a writer in the English-speaking world.
Matthias Küntzel, political scientist and author
We are totally satisfied with the translation and proofreading services provided by John Rosenthal for our program of publications on architecture and visual arts. We especially want to note his professionalism, responsiveness and dedication to projects and their sponsors.
Architecture Unit of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation
John Rosenthal's excellent language skills and deep understanding of specialized terminology resulted in precise and reader-friendly translations of my scholarly articles and books into English. I would gladly work with him again and can recommend him unreservedly.
Hagen Krämer, Professor of Economics, Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences
Services Offered
Translation
Scholarly translation demands not only accurate and idiomatic rendering of the source document in the target language, but also appropriate adaptation of scholarly apparatus from source to target. I will ensure that your footnotes and references are reproduced using the correct English-language citation conventions and, where appropriate, I will find and substitute English-language versions of texts that you have cited in German or French or other languages.
Editing/Proofreading
I am not available for “post-editing” machine translations. Machine translation programs will, in any case, struggle with certain aspects of academic writing – for instance, correctly rendering citations. But I am happy to work with machine translation (DeepL) to offer you faster translation turnaround at highly competitive rates.
