About The Detail Woman

 

Profile

The Detail Woman, LLC is owned by Sarah “Alys” Lindholm. I’m a translator, terminologist, teacher, and occasionally lexicographer. After 20 years in the entertainment industry, I left my in-house position in August 2023 to focus on my own business.

My former in-house gigs include translation, QC, project management, and people management: I was a translator and then a DVD Coordinator at ADV Films, then the QA Translator and later Translation Manager for FUNimation Entertainment (later Crunchyroll). Throughout that time, I also operated a freelance business doing other fun things: teaching Japanese language and culture, translating everything from Japanese animator interviews to academic papers, and proofreading English text for video games.

As a lover of language and sometime resident in the Land of the Rising Sun, Japanese has fascinated me since I first encountered it in the mid-1990s. The creative exercise of translation has fascinated me for almost as long.

As a Voting Member of the American Translators Association, I subscribe to its code of ethics.

Why “The Detail Woman”?

A good question! Like most translators, I tend to obsess over details. But one day a coworker felt my detail-oriented nature so strongly that she called me ザ・細かい女 (za komakai onna). Being called a komakai onna in Japanese isn’t flattering; it carries a connotation of being “fussy” and getting hung up on inconsequential things. But the English translation that immediately occurred to me was “The Detail Woman,” which in English sounds much nicer. Since I’m the kind of person who likes to think of herself as “meticulous” rather than “anal”… but can also laugh at herself because she knows she’s got some “fussiness,” I’ve used the nickname in both languages ever since.

 

See also: My Services | List of Works