About

Joe Keady, MA, has been a freelance German- and Spanish-to-English translator since 2008. Since then, he has translated hundreds of legal, technical, commercial, and personal documents as well as two books of German historiography. He has also subtitled more than a dozen feature films for the DEFA Film Library and is currently working on a translation of Rudolf Rocker's memoirs for PM Press (for details, see the Projects page).

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He's also been actively monitoring the international far right since 2015. His writing on that subject generally focuses on a) the links between far right rhetoric and action and b) radical right wing nationalism as an international phenomenon. He has published related research, essays, and translations in The Battleground, Truthout, tageszeitung, Jungle World, EuropeNow, and elsewhere.

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Joe is also a founding worker-owner of the Just Words Translators & Interpreters Cooperative and a member of the editorial collective behind Barricade: A Journal of Antifascism & Translation. His translation clients have included university professors, global leaders in renewable energy, and non-profits supporting migrant workers, as well as individuals who need their personal documents translated and big corporations that pay him money so he can eat. He worked for two years as the in-house subtitler at the DEFA Film Library, which is the international distributor for the entire catalog of films produced by the official state film studio in East Germany (RIP).

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He earned an MA in Translation Studies from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2020 and has been certified as a German-to-English translator by New York University and the American Translators Association.

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