Barbara Inge Karsch
TLM Adjunct Faculty
- Office
- Woodinville, WA
- Tel
- (425) 408-1762
- bkarsch@middlebury.edu
“I have done many different things in the last 25 years, but they all revolved around terminology. When a student recently asked me about my favorite aspect I didn’t have to think: training others. I love sharing my experience, enabling colleagues or challenging the intellect of the next generation.”
“While I was a student at the Monterey Institute I dreamed of coming back as an instructor. At the time, though, I couldn’t imagine anything but working on site. For Microsoft, I provided training to dozens of translators. It had to be in webinar format. And it worked. I was delighted when NYU invited me to teach in the online Master’s program in 2012 and when MIIS followed four years later. My favorite aspect is that the human gets to be at the center. Not the process or the tool, as is the case in many IT companies, but the development of the student, specifically their technical as well as their soft skills. And, yes, soft skills are important when you are trying to solve terminology problems.”
Areas of Interest
Expertise
Barbara Inge Karsch assists companies and organizations with projects around terminology tools, processes and skills. She identifies the best terminology management system for a customer, implements it and sets up workflows. She develops the training that a team needs to successfully manage terminology and thus corporate language. She also does terminology work for clients.
Recent Accomplishments
- Implementation of the terminology management systems TermWeb and Kalcium, including complex workflows, at various software companies
- Online workshop series in terminology management for a team at a software company
- Term extraction and preparation of terminology for a 7-million-word MT translation project in the life sciences for a language service provider
- Translation of “Terminology Work—Best Practices” from German into English
Previous Work
After graduating from MIIS, Barbara worked for J.D. Edwards as translator for German and English. While there, she became a terminologist. But she also developed an internship, and for the next seven years provided guidance to some 35 students, the majority from MIIS. She then joined Microsoft as terminology researcher and worked both at headquarters in Redmond and in her native Germany. Since 2010, she has been providing terminology development, consulting and training for companies and organizations, such as Adobe, the Council of the EU, Facebook, Intuit, and others.
She is an adjunct assistant professor at New York University and has also taught at KU Leuven at Antwerp, Belgium, and the University of Washington. As US delegate to ISO TC 37, Barbara is leading the revision of ISO 12616 (Translation-Oriented Terminography). Barbara has dual citizenship from Germany and the United States and lives outside of Seattle, WA, with her partner, Jay. In her spare time, she volunteers as a puppy raiser for Summit Assistance Dogs.
Education
- BA-equivalent in Translation and Interpretation for German, English and French from Sprachen-und Dolmetscher Institut, Munich, Germany
- MA in Translation and Interpreting from MIIS
- PhD-level research in terminology management at the University of Vienna, Austria