Alan Machin

Alan Machin is a translator in his late thirties, based in Lyon. He taught mathematics in a lycée before leaving the classroom to translate popular-science and technology writing between English and French.

A teacher's instinct still shapes his work: he would rather a sentence be clear than clever, and he checks every term against how a French reader would actually say it. He boulders at the local gym, bakes sourdough on a slow schedule, and does the Sunday marché without a list.

For Namefi he localizes writing about domains and naming into French — attentive to accents and hyphens in domain names, .fr's rules, and the running tension between franglais that sounds current and French that will still read well next year.