Meet Thomas West

By Paula Arellano Geoffroy, 25 September 2025

Former lawyer and legal translator Tom West joined SENSE in May this year. He is a certified translator from French, Spanish, German and Dutch into English, and is a former president of the American Translators Association (ATA). I reached out to him to ask about his background, and about the key to translating so many languages. Below you will find his interesting answers.

I understand that you are American but have now settled in Amersfoort. Can you tell us a bit about your background and why you decided to move to the Netherlands?

I had always dreamed of living in Europe, and following an unwanted and painful divorce, I decided to make the move. It turns out that there is a Dutch-American Friendship Treaty that makes it rather easy for an American to get a visa to work as an entrepreneur in the Netherlands. I moved here in February of this year and had my verblijfsvergunning in my pocket six weeks later. The efficiency in this country is impressive.

How was your experience as president of ATA?

I had the privilege of serving as president of ATA in the early 2000s, when the profession was growing by leaps and bounds. It was an exciting time. Unlike the situation in Europe, there are very few schools that offer degrees in translation (or even training for translators) in the United States, so I made it my task to invite as many experts as possible to our conferences so that working translators could get the training they desired and couldn’t find elsewhere. There were so many people joining the profession at the time that we were able to offer specialized conferences on legal or financial or medical translation in addition to our large annual conference. A wonderful byproduct of the experience was that my predecessor, Ann Macfarlane, under whom I served two years as president elect of the association, is a natural leader and teacher who taught me a lot about servant leadership and how to run an effective meeting. Those lessons from Ann have stood me in good stead ever since.

Of all the languages that you master, which are your preferred ones? How did you learn them?

That’s sort of like asking me which of my children is my favourite. I can’t answer it because I’ve never really met a language I didn’t like. But I can tell you about my experience with each one. At some point in my childhood my mother happened to tell me that people in other countries speak differently than we do, that they even have completely different languages! For reasons I still don’t understand, I was so fascinated by that idea that I wanted to learn as many languages as possible. I grew up in a monolingual English-speaking family in a part of the US where most people trace their ancestry to the UK, so hearing or speaking other languages first-hand wasn’t a possibility, but my parents gave me their high school French and Spanish textbooks from the 1950s, and I set about studying them – although it felt more like play to me.

I took French and Latin in high school, spent a summer in Mexico supposedly teaching English but actually learning Spanish, and then started studying German and Russian at university. I majored in French and went on to get a master’s in German – switching gears, so to speak, because I couldn’t decide which language I liked better. I taught first-year German at the university where I did my master’s and then spent two years teaching French and Spanish at a secondary school. But I began to grow restless, so I set off for law school and obtained the Juris Doctor degree, was admitted to the Bar and practiced law at a large firm for five years. But I still wanted to study languages all the time, and even the evening courses in Dutch and Swedish I attended at a sort of volksuniversiteit in Atlanta were not enough. In the meantime, other lawyers at the firm began asking me to translate legal documents for them in addition to my regular legal work, often because they had already received an unusable translation from a local translation agency. I found that work even more interesting than drafting contracts, and after five years, I decided to try my hand at being an entrepreneur. So I left the law firm and started my own translation agency specializing in legal translation. Over the years I put together a fine team of other lawyers who had left the law to become legal translators along with other translators who specialized in legal documents. The company ultimately grew to over a million dollars in revenue, and we were known not only in the US, but also particularly in the Frankfurt market in Germany for the quality of our translations.

Because I have always been a collector of words, at the outset of my translation career I started recording the terminology that I had researched, especially because I find comparative law so interesting. One of my first clients was a large law firm in Miami with clients all over Latin America, so for example, we would receive documents from Guatemala on Monday, Argentina on Tuesday, Mexico on Wednesday, Costa Rica on Thursday and Ecuador on Friday. It is uncanny how much the legal terminology differs from one Latin American country to another, and back in those pre-Internet days, I travelled to law libraries in Latin America and at US law schools to research puzzling Latin American legal terms that had not made their way into any of the reference works. In 1999 I published the first edition of my Spanish-English Dictionary of Law and Business (the third edition of which will appear later this year), and I believe that if I have made any contribution at all to my chosen profession, this is it. The dictionary has been a bestseller, not only among translators, but also among lawyers working in the Latin American market. Over the years, I have also published the Trilingual Swiss Law Dictionary (Swiss French into German and English, and Swiss German into French and English) – because I found Swiss legal terminology in German so opaque – and also the Swedish-English Law Dictionary – because I did a lot of work from Swedish to English at one point. A visit to the Netherlands several years ago resulted in a large multi-year project for Aard van den End, vetting the entries in his famous ‘Juridisch Lexicon’. That took me deeper into Dutch legal terminology, and because the lexicon translates Dutch into both English and German, it became a fascinating three-way exercise in comparative law, often with Belgium thrown into the mix, making it a four-way game (Belgian law is sometimes more like French law than Dutch or German law). I can’t get enough of that, and still read comparative law books for fun.

I should also mention that I fell in love with Afrikaans before a trip to South Africa in 2016, and since my move to the Netherlands, I’ve attended Afrikaans classes at the Zuid-Afrikahuis in Amsterdam. I particularly like Afrikaans poetry and find it a joy to speak and listen to, but it certainly creates a lot of interference with my Dutch!

What kind of projects are you currently working on?

As I said, I’m a collector of words, and I love lexicography, so I am currently putting the finishing touches on a new ‘French-English Dictionary of Law and Business’, as a companion to the third edition of my ‘Spanish-English Dictionary of Law’, both of which I hope to publish this year. I continue to translate court documents, most often from French, Spanish or German into English. That’s the kind of text I enjoy the most because it allows me to put my legal training to its best use. I continue to teach legal translation online. And I’m working on my Russian by taking lessons on Italki.

What is your take on AI and translations?

I’m afraid that a lot of the legal translation market began to dry up with the introduction of DeepL in 2017, and my impression is that lawyers began using it in droves, particularly because it produces a translation in a matter of minutes. For example, many or even most of the contract translations into English we used to prepare were for information purposes only, because only the original untranslated version was going to be signed and would govern. The speed desired and the lack of a need for complete accuracy have made DeepL and other programs a game changer for lawyers (and did I mention that these translations are available for free or next to nothing?). Fortunately for our profession, I find that DeepL is much less able to translate court documents accurately, so there is still a market for that. As for AI, I feel certain that lawyers are using it for translations as well, but I am less familiar with how well AI handles legal documents. I do find ChatGPT strangely inaccurate when I ask it questions about law in other countries.

How did you learn about SENSE and why did you decide to join?

Earlier this year, I attended a meeting in Vienna of the ATA German Language Division in Europe (GLD-Europe). There I had dinner with my long-time colleague Dr. Karen Leube, who lives in Aachen. She has been head of the GLD and a member of SENSE and she advised me to join SENSE right away – which I did!

What do you enjoy doing in your free time?

My passions other than languages are music, travelling and reading. I wasted no time joining a local choir when I moved to Amersfoort and have loved it, not least because we sing in Dutch, German, French and English! I have to admit that I miss my piano, which is in storage back in the US. One of the most wonderful things about finally living in Europe is that I can attend concerts and other musical events so easily. In July I attended a ‘sing-along’ in London with the great British composer John Rutter – and believe me, it is much easier to take the Eurostar from Amsterdam to London for the weekend than to fly from the US to Heathrow! And I delight in the fact that I can check the concert schedule at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam and be there in less than an hour – and in five hours, I can even be in Berlin for a whole weekend of music.

Are you a good reader? Have you read something interesting recently?

I love to read and usually have several books going at once. Currently, I’m reading ‘Wisselwachter: Amerika-Europa 1933-1945’ by Geert Mak, which I highly recommend. I’m about halfway through ‘Wir Kinder des 20. Juli’, by Tim Pröse, which is important to me because one of my friends in Germany is the granddaughter of one of the leaders of the plot to assassinate Hitler on 20 July 1944; he was hanged at Plötzensee for his participation in the conspiracy, and his wife (my friend’s grandmother) was sent to a concentration camp, where she fortunately survived. In English I’m reading Katja Hoyer’s ‘Beyond the Wall: East Germany 1949-1990’. So you can see that I read almost exclusively nonfiction and am particularly interested in history. But last fall, while still in the States, I participated in an online Russian reading group where we read ‘Anna Karenina’. I had never read it, and despite my general lack of interest in fiction, I found it beautifully written and very compelling. So I may well pick up another work of fiction one of these days.