Division Administrator – Rafa Lombardino (California – USA)

Rafa Lombardino was born in Santos, São Paulo, and has been living in California since 2002. She started her career in 1997 and today runs Word Awareness, a small network of professional translators. Certified by the ATA (EN>PT, PT>EN) and by the University of California San Diego Extension (ES>EN), Rafa acts as the Content Curator of the literary translation blog eWordNews and is the founder of Contemporary Brazilian Short Stories, a website that promotes Brazilian authors in English. In 2014, she wrote “Tools and Technology in Translation,” a book inspired by the class she has been teaching at UCSD Extension since 2010.

Assistant Division Administrator – Roberta Barroca (Florida – USA)

According to her astrological birth chart, Roberta Barroca was born a communicator. She’s a Gemini with Virgo rising, both signs ruled by Mercury, the planet of communication. Believe it or not, she did embrace communication in everything she chose to do in her professional life. Roberta majored in Journalism but soon discovered interpreting and fell in love with it. She’s been a passionate interpreter, an occasional translator and an amateur writer for almost 10 years. She spent a great deal of her career in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where she’s had the opportunity to work in different sectors ranging from oil and gas to sports and medicine. As fate would have it, she ended up specializing in motivational speakers, gurus and coaches. She attended her first ATA Conference in 2007 in San Francisco and since then she’s had great respect and admiration for the work carried out by the ATA. In 2016, Roberta joined PLD’s Leadership Council and, among other things, helped to organize the ATA PLD meet-ups, a new initiative the PLD undertook with great success.

Mirna has been a translator and an interpreter for as long as she can remember. What started as a job to get her through college became a career, at first sidetracking other activities and then taking up front and center. She holds a Master’s in Language Studies from PUC-Rio and has worked in areas as varied as subtitling, simultaneous interpretation and book translations. Mirna has a longtime involvement with the ATA; before being the PLD Administrator from 2015 to 2017, she had the opportunity to speak in ATA Annual Conferences, volunteer for the PLD Leadership Council and become a Certified Translator from Portuguese into English and English into Portuguese. Originally from Brazil, Mirna has for years specialized in work for international organizations, and currently lives in Washington, D.C., where she is a staff interpreter for the Inter-American Defense College and teaches in the Graduate Studies in Interpreting and Translation at the University of Maryland.

Érika Lessa (Washington, DC)

Érika is a Portuguese Staff Interpreter and Translator at the Inter-American Defense College. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Language and Literature and a Master’s degree in Conference Interpreting, the latter granted by York University, Canada. Érika worked as a teacher for 11 years and started to transition towards interpretation and translation in 2006, finally making it her full-time career in 2010. As a translator, one of her first experiences was in the 2007 Pan-American Games, in Rio. She has worked in different sectors of the industry, including literature, humanities in general, marketing, subtitling, software and game localization. As an interpreter, she is proud to have worked at international events such as Rio +20 and Bill Clinton’s visit to her hometown, in Northern Brazil. After serving PLD as Assistant Administrator from 2015 to 2017, Érika is now back to the Division’s Leadership Council.

Catherine V. Howard (Vermont, USA)

Catherine translates social and environmental research texts from Portuguese, Spanish, and French into English through her company TranslationCraft Services. She has spent a total of seven years living in Brazil, including three years in the Amazon, where she conducted linguistic research on five indigenous languages on the verge of disappearing. Having left her heart in Brazil, she tries to matar saudades by translating short stories and creative nonfiction by some of Brazil’s finest writers so the rest of the world can savor their artistry.

Lynnea Hansen (Wisconsin, USA)

Lynnea Hansen is a conference interpreter (Portuguese<>English), US State Department contract interpreter, translator (Portuguese>English) and English proofreader from the USA. She graduated from New York University in international relations, began translating and interpreting during an internship at an NGO, then worked at United Nations headquarters for two years, moved to Brazil and continued translation, proofreading and interpreting (graduated from Rio Brasillis), including interpreting President Obama in Washington DC in 2016. She has 24 years of experience and many hundreds of articles translated or edited/proofread which have been published in international academic journals.

Beatriz Figueiredo (Toronto, Canada)

Beatriz started working as a professional translator by combining her linguistic skills and educational background in healthcare. She has worked with a wide range of clients in the public and private sectors, including LSPs, government agencies, universities, law firms and multinational companies. Since being trained as a conference interpreter in 2013, she has worked at a number of international events in Brazil and in Canada, where she now lives with her family. The biggest challenge in her T&I career was to interpret for scholar David Harvey… in front of an audience of 3,000 people!

Barbara Mendes (Lisboa, Portugal)

Barbara is an English > Brazilian Portuguese translator from Rio de Janeiro and has over 13 years of experience providing high-quality service in translation, transcreation, localization and LQA. At university she studied English and Portuguese, but decided to specialize in translation. She is currently working towards a Master’s in Translation Studies from Universidade de Lisboa, in Portugal. Barbara spends half of the year in Brazil and the other half in Portugal, besides attending several translation conferences around the globe.

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