From Government to Language Consulting: A New Chapter

Yes. Hello.

I retired from the US Government after 21 years of service yesterday. The emotions! Joy, grief, excitement. Little bit of fear. But mostly gratitude. For a career with people and experiences that pushed me waaaay beyond what I ever thought I could do or become. Thank you, Thank you, Thank you, NSA.

And now it’s about what’s next.

Earlier this summer I set up my sole-proprietorship Language Consulting firm – AC Stepan WordWorks, the focus of which is frankly still evolving. At first I wanted to do ALL THE WORD THINGS: Editing! Translation! Teaching! English! Slavic! ALL THE WORDS!

My exuberance has been moderated over the last few months- and not in a bad way. What I know is this: I’m committed to doing work that brings me joy, helps the world in some way, and allows me the flexibility to spend time with my beloveds, to include my garden and my bicycles.

During a few months of experimentation on various freelance platforms and tries-and-fails (for instance why am I regularly offered tutoring opportunities for Serbian*? I don’t do that one…) I have gained some clarity.

What I love is foreign languages and cultures. Specifically of the Slavic kind. My first love was Russian, but my sole mate (soulmate!! but also- Freudian slip?) is Czech. Also of course that’s probably the most difficult one I could have chosen. Very on-brand for me.

I’ve got my hands in a lot of pies at the moment (AbFab reference- “Eddie Pie Hands”) — I’m testing out Translation Memory tools like MemoQ, Phrase, and CafeTran Espresso. I’m playing around a lot with MT solutions (everyone knows Google Translate, but DeepL is really good, especially for Czech). I’m definitely partnering with AI like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity- while they don’t get everything right, and you definitely have to “trust but verify” (or maybe not even trust)- I’ve found them a great “starting point” resource to ask tricky grammar questions related to the way things might be translated and why– for instance, did you know web pages are conceptually “flat” in Czech whereas tabs and address bars are “three dimensional” and thus require different prepositions for expressions involving “putting things on them / in them” – not unlike English in this case!

If you mean paste into the address bar of the browser → then it’s a container, so Czech uses vložit do adresního řádku.

If you mean paste into a new tab → Czech still treats the tab like a container, so it’s vložit do nové karty / do nové záložky (depending on which browser terminology you’re following!)

If you mean paste onto a webpage → Czech treats the page like it’s a surface, and it’s vložit na stránku.

Don’t get me started. We’ll be here all day.

I’m volunteering time and skills with a number of efforts – mostly involving Czech ↔ English translation. I’m exploring some data annotation work / model training work as well- in English but also in Czech. I just discovered Language Reactor (hello, where have I been?) – what an awesome tool for language learning! And it has a really interesting media upload / transcription / translation capability as well.  

So, this blog is part of all of … that. I will say traditionally I have been terrible at keeping up with blogging. I’ll do a post or two then get busy with other things and then that’s it. It’s the same way with diaries and journaling. I can sustain about two entries, max.  But I am committed to posting regularly here in my new life, because I am excited about everything I am learning and some of the projects I am starting to be involved in.

So here I am- 1 October 2025. Day 1! Thanks for reading! And more to come!

*I believe the current formal name of this language is Bosnian/ Croatian/ Montenegrin/ Serbian, or BCMS. The requests I receive ask for Serbian, full stop.