Assistant Professor of Professional Practice, Spanish Translation
Professor Andreu has worked as a literary translator for about 25 years, during which time he has translated some two hundred titles from English and German into Spanish and Catalan for several top Spanish and U.S. publishers. In addition to his core literary background, he also has sizable experience outside the publishing circuit, where some of his clients include the Council on Foreign Relations, FIFA, MACBA (Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona), the Goethe Institut, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, AARP, the City of Salinas, and the County of San Diego Health & Human Services Agency.
Professor Andreu’s interests in translation lie at the intersection of human expertise, intuition, and technology. His courses focus on both the quality of translation output and a sound translation process based on efficiency and best practices. He believes in preparing his students to leverage translation technologies (machine translation and machine translation post-editing, corpus linguistics, gen AI and terminology tools) while emphasizing the importance of old-school hard skills: solid linguistic abilities, discursive cohesion, analytical acuity and creativity.
From a pragmatic perspective, Professor Andreu believes that translation practice at its best involves a multifaceted relationship with collaborators, proofreaders, fact-checkers, and publishers, each of whom brings their own knowledge, sensibility, priorities, and points of view to the project. He believes in the idea of translation as a team effort, a process leading to negotiation and enrichment, as it encourages flexibility, agreeing on criteria, respecting other people’s methodologies, decisions and workflow, and assuming shared responsibility, values he strives to bring into the classroom experience.
Professor Andreu holds an BA in Translation and Interpretation from Universitat Pompeu Fabra and an MA in Literary Theory and Comparative Literature from Universitat de Barcelona, with a specialization in exophonic writers—that is, authors who at some point produce their fiction in a language other than their mother tongue (think Vladimir Nabokov, Samuel Beckett, Joseph Conrad, Ha Jin, Agota Kristof, Jhumpa Lahiri or Milan Kundera).
Languages: Spanish, Catalan, English, German
His translations include Fortune Smiles, by Adam Johnson, winner of the National Book Award for Fiction in 2015, A Visit from the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2011, and The Orphan’s Master Son, by Adam Johnson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2013, as well as works by Dana Spiotta, Doris Lessing, John Grisham, James Patterson, Gerald Murnane, Ingo Schulze, Uwe Timm, Erika Mann, and John Green among many others.
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