BROADWIN, John A. 1944-

PERSONAL: Born April 17, 1944, in Palo Alto, CA; son of Henry (in business) and Bertyl Muller (Berlin) Broadwin. Ethnicity: "Caucasian." Education: Stanford University, B.A., 1966; University of California—Los Angeles, M.A., 1971. Hobbies and other interests: Reading, crossword puzzles, swimming, walking.

ADDRESSES: Home—706 Regal Court, Menlo Park, CA 94025. Office—Hubert H. Semans Library, Foothill College, 12345 El Monte Rd., Los Altos Hills, CA 94022. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: California State University, Sacramento, CA, assistant catalog librarian, 1972-74; Felix Dietrich Verlag (publisher), Osnabruck, West Germany (now Germany), indexer and translator, 1974-75; National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD, selector of medical literature, 1975-79; Letterman Army Institute of Research, San Francisco, CA, administrative librarian, 1979-83; Stanford University, Stanford, CA, head of reference and bibliographic instruction at Engineering Library, 1983-88; Veterans Administration Medical Center, Palo Alto, CA, medical librarian at Health Services Library, 1988-90; Foothill College, Los Altos Hills, CA, collection development librarian at Hubert H. Semans Library, 1990—.

MEMBER: Phi Beta Kappa.

AWARDS, HONORS: Alumni Association Award for Academic Distinction, University of California—Los Angeles, 1971; library associate, National Library of Medicine, 1974-75; Outstanding Achievement Award, U.S. Department of the Army, 1980.

WRITINGS:

(Translator) Timothy W. Mason, Social Policy in the Third Reich: The Working Class and the 'National Community', edited by Jane Caplan, Berg Publishers (New York, NY), 1993.

(Translator) Hilmar Hoffmann, The Triumph of Propaganda: Film and National Socialism, 1933-1945, Berghahn Books (New York, NY), 1996.

(Translator) Ruth Liepman, Maybe Luck Isn't Just Chance (nonfiction), Northwestern University Press (Evanston, IL), 1997.

(Translator) Heinrich Schipperges, Hildegard of Bingen: Healing and the Nature of the Cosmos, Markus Wiener Publishers (Princeton, NJ), 1997.

(With Ingeborg Hecht and others) Invisible Walls: A German Family under the Nuremberg Laws; and To Remember Is to Heal: Encounters between Victims of the Nuremberg Laws, Northwestern University Press (Evanston, IL), 1999.

(Translator) Piotr O. Scholz, Eunuchs and Castrati, Markus Wiener Publishers (Princeton, NJ), 2001.

(Translator) Angelika Konigseder and others, Waiting for Hope: Jewish Displaced Persons in Post World War II Germany, Northwestern University Press (Evanston, IL), 2001.

(Translator) Hans Frankenthal, The Unwelcome One, Northwestern University Press (Evanston, IL), in press.

WORK IN PROGRESS: Translating the preface to Les Vrais riches, for Northwestern University Press (Evanston, IL).

SIDELIGHTS: John A. Broadwin once told CA: "While working for a publishing house in Germany in 1974, I happened to see a note posted on a bulletin board at the local university—a professor was looking for someone to translate his article into English for publication in a scientific journal. The subject matter—neuronal responses to peripheral temperature changes in the rat thalamus—wasn't exactly electrifying. But, before I knew it, I was hooked.

"I enjoy the intellectual stimulation of putting someone else's ideas into my native language, trying to give non-English-speaking writers a voice in idiomatic English, especially if the original is worth the effort. Tim Mason's Social Policy in the Third Reich: The Working Class and the 'National Community' was just such a work. It also turned out to be quite a chastening experience. Mason was a British historian who wrote in both English and German. Unlike many in the social sciences, he had a flair for writing. So it was a real challenge to translate him back into a language in which he had already established a reputation as a gifted stylist.

"I have always thought it better to make available a good book by someone else than inflict a poorer book of one's own. The only sad thing is that translation is still the Cinderella of scholarship. I only hope that, like the heroine of the fairy tale, translation and translators will receive the honor and respect they deserve."