Translator and editor. A farm girl turned city girl and international resident. Lapsed musician. Occasional psychologist. Cookbook compiler. Insatiably Curious.
Joined October 2020
- Tweets 2,231
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- Likes 2,971
766 Photos and videos
Pinned Tweet
28 Aug 2025
Beginnings - back in 2007. Launched into the universe of words and stories.
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If you were Mrs Morgan, would you have taken the job?
May 31
We’ve come a long way baby or at least we thought we had. I found this letter in the house that I bought
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HeleneVdW Translator Editor retweeted
Apr 27
It was about 11:55am on 27 April 1994, at the age of 33, that I entered a Polling Booth in Mitchell’s Plain for the first time in my life to cast a ballot for the government of my choice.
I broke down in tears. Waves of emotion swept over me. I will never forget that moment.
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HeleneVdW Translator Editor retweeted
23 Mar 2025
Thank you for dedicating nearly 3 million hours (and counting!) to our planet this year.
Thanks to your commitment to protecting our one shared home, we created a record-breaking #BiggestHourForEarth, doubling last year’s record of 1.4 million hours!
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Neither do I.
Feb 25
I don't want a city on Mars.
I don't want AI in every app.
I don't want data centres in space.
I want clean water.
I want a stable climate.
I want bees to survive.
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HeleneVdW Translator Editor retweeted
30 Nov 2025
Sad to miss this year’s Huberte Rupert Memorial Concert in Stellenbosch on Friday featuring Frankfurt-based violist, Eike Coetzee. Presented by the Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra it funds an overseas young South African musician to come home & perform with @CapePhil Salutes!
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27 Nov 2025
Villainarious! 😂 @ellerhymes is a genius.
youtube.com/watch?v=zEaqySLi…
I can't stop laughing at The Chicago Manual of Style bit. I just wish she had The New Oxford Style Manual too. Double trouble, sort of. I'm not sure for whom though.
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16 Nov 2025
My admiration for human artists staying human in the age of AI is increasing by the day. A friend posted this cartoon by #luiscoelho of Purr.in.ink. #drawing #penonpaper #crosshatching. The irony of humans not thinking (but AI-ing) looms large.
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3 Nov 2025
AI sometimes turns evil, and **no one quite knows why**. wired.com/story/ai-black-box… This is a lie...
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3 Nov 2025
The crux of Harari's interview: You can't build good from evil. AI is like a child. It learns by watching its naughty parents. youtube.com/watch?v=jt3Ul3rP… If you don't know, go learn.
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12 Oct 2025
Joseph Heller completed his second novel, Something Happened, thirteen years after Catch-22. In an interview with The New York Times, he talked about Robert Gotlieb's value as an editor.
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12 Oct 2025
"The day the interview ran, Bob called me and said he didn’t think it was a good idea to talk about editing and the contributions of editors, since the public likes to think everything in the book comes right from the author."
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12 Oct 2025
In Gottlieb’s conversation with The Paris Review, he said: "The last thing anyone reading Jane Eyre would want to know, for example, is that I had convinced Charlotte Brontë that the first Mrs. Rochester should go up in flames." Source Text: The Paris Review No AI was used.
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29 Sep 2025
English Translation: Multilingualism - always advantageous. Hopefully, you know enough languages to understand the 'Dog Afrikaans' uttered by the mouse to scare the cat.
Happy Translation Day, colleagues all over the world.
Image: Die Afrikaanse Taalraad
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31 Aug 2025
Thread: 1/3 The Ndlovu Youth Choir has just launched an official isiZulu version of Bohemian Rhapsody.
youtube.com/watch?v=gbljPQbx…
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31 Aug 2025
Thread: 2/3 @ChoirAfrica's conductor, Ralf Schmitt, is a maestro. Back in 2019, he did the English version of the song with Rustenburg High School.
youtube.com/watch?v=9Nllpdz2…
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31 Aug 2025
Thread: 3/3 The resemblance in style and execution is undeniable. I'm fascinated by the two choir versions of this song, clearly illustrating how language, music, and dance reverberate across cultures, making us all just human.
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27 Aug 2025
This quote comes from an interview with Jacki Lyden at NPR in their special series on poetry.
npr.org/transcripts/4990320
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16 Aug 2025
When Kazuo Ishiguro won the Nobel prize in 2017, the Swedish Academy wrote in a statement that Ishiguro, “in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world.”
In an interview, he clarified it as follows:
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4 Aug 2025
In JR Salamanca's book 'Lilith' (1961), Robert Gottlieb suggested that Salamanca change the title to ‘Lilith’ (the main character's name). She didn’t appear in the first sixty or eighty pages at all, but even if she didn’t, said Gottlieb, the reader would be expecting her.
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