Dawid Czech

I’m a literary translator in English and German. So far, I’ve translated seven books, including "Orwell’s Roses" by Rebecca Solnit. Before entering the literary translation market, I worked for eight years as a freelance scientific translator. In 2019, I obtained a PhD in linguistics and since then I’ve been teaching translation theory and practice to undergraduate students. In my free time, I read books, play video games, and roll dice in D&D. I try to learn something new every day.

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What I do

Literary translation

I'm a native speaker of Polish and I have native-like command of English. I’ve also mastered German at C1 (advanced) level. My services include literary translation (EN-PL, PL-EN, DE-PL, DE-EN) of popular science books, essays, reportages, novels and comics. I subject each of my translations to at least two rounds of internal editing and proofreading before submitting them to the publishers.

Specialized translation

I offer specialized translation (EN-PL and PL-EN) of scientific texts (papers submitted to English-language journals, monographs, books), in particular in neuroscience, cognitive psychology and linguistics. I also consider assignments in other disciplines—I’ve translated articles in, to name a few, dendrology, physical therapy, architecture, culture studies.

Editing and proofreading

I have several years of experience in teaching academic writing, and I have worked as the editor-in-chief of an academic journal during my PhD studies. I offer services in editing (for clarity or proper use of academic English), adjusting a text to given publishing or editorial standards (e.g. citation systems), and proofreading (for language correctness).

Reviewing

I’m closely following the publishing market, always keeping an eye out for exciting new releases and finding underappreciated gems, especially popular science books and books on social issues. I can prepare pre-publication reviews of titles under consideration. I also try to be as much engaged in the publishing process as possible, sending proposals of books that caught my attention and are aligned with the publisher’s profile.

Quotes from books I've translated

To write in plain, vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox.

George Orwell

Prevention of Literature

Bread can be managed by authoritarian regimes, but roses are something individuals must be free to find for themselves, discovered and cultivated rather than prescribed.

Rebecca Solnit

Orwell's Roses

The planting of a tree, especially one of the long-living hardwood trees, is a gift which you can make to posterity at almost no cost and with almost no trouble, and if the tree takes root it will far outlive the visible effect of any of your other actions, good or evil.

George Orwell

A Good Word for the Vicar of Bray

The structure of great fiction is based on multivocality, on a democracy of different perspectives where even the villain has a voice, while bad fiction reduces all voices to one voice, that of the writer.

Azar Nafisi

Read Dangerously

You have to know why people behave as they do—and design around their foibles and limitations, rather than some ideal.

Cliff Kuang

User Friendly

“If you dig into Orwell’s work, you find a lot of sentences about flowers and pleasures and the natural world. If you read enough of those sentences the gray portrait turns to color, and if you look for these passages, even his last masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four, changes complexion.

Rebecca Solnit

Orwell's Roses

Mathematicians like to overthink things. It’s sort of what we do. We take some concept that everyone understands on a basic level, like symmetry or equality, and pick it apart, trying to find a deeper meaning to it.

Milo Beckman

Math Without Numbers