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.

Melissa Harkin is a Brazilian translator working in Portuguese, Spanish, and English, and specializing in journalistic, legal, energy, and sustainable development content. She has a Bachelor’s Degree of Laws, MBA in Strategic Management, Certificate in Translation and Subtitling, Certificate in English for Journalism, a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Specialization, and a Specialization in Effective Communication: Writing, Design, and Presentation. From 1997 to 2011, she worked part-time as a translator while dedicating herself to her original legal background. In January 2012, Melissa decided to dedicate herself full-time to translations and has since been providing her services to several national and international development banks, major international NGOs, and multinational companies. She is a member of the American Translators Association (ATA), Brazilian Translators Association (Abrates), New England Translators Association (NETA), and the administrator for the New York Circle of Translators (NYCT) — a chapter of the ATA.

Copyeditor – 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.

Copyeditor – 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.

Hospitality and Events – 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.

Outreach Coordinator – Todd Harkin (Connecticut, USA)

Todd Harkin is a Portuguese > English translator from Missouri (USA), specializing in food, sustainable development, and medical/pharmaceutical content, as well as in cultural equivalence in translation. He transitioned to a full-time career in translation in 2018, after more than 25 years in the food industry in different countries. Todd has a Bachelor’s Degree in Gastronomy and Hospitality Management and Certificates in Portuguese as a Second Language (Mackenzie University), Medical Translation (Escola de Tradutores), Technical Translation (Geronymus), and Conference Interpreting (Escola de Tradutores). He is currently studying English-Portuguese Translation in the Graduate Program of Estácio University. A formally trained and certified Chef, Todd is the personification of a foodie translator.

Volunteer Opportunities!

We’re always looking for engaged members to help us make PLD better.

Email us to see how you can help!