Nathalie McGinn started at ARLIS as a RISC intern in the summer of 2022, one semester before graduating with an MA in linguistics. Before that, her educational and professional focus had been on language policy, language instruction, and translation/interpretation. Nathalie received my BA in translation for German, French, English, and Russian from a Swiss university many years ago and worked as a language instructor and translator both in Europe and the United States for over a decade.
Before attending graduate school, Nathalie taught German at the Foreign Service Institute, where she also trained to become an ILR tester. When language classes came to a stop because of COVID, she decided to pursue a graduate degree in linguistics, where she shifted my focus more toward the theoretical aspects of syntax, semantics, and phonology, and where she had the opportunity to make first contact with and subsequentially became hooked to computational linguistics. Nathalie's personal language inventory so far comprises around 10 natural languages as well as Python and rudimentary R, but that number is going to keep climbing.