John Broadwin

Background

John Broadwin was born on April 17, 1944, in Palo Alto, California, United States, to Henry Broadwin, a businessman, and Bertyl Muller (Berlin) Broadwin.

Education

Broadwin was educated at Stanford University, receiving his bachelor's degree in 1966. He then obtained his master's degree from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1971.

Career

Broadwin's career began at California State University Library in Sacramento as an assistant catalog librarian for two years from 1972. For a year from 1974, he worked at Felix Dietrich Verlag, Osnabrück, Germany as an indexer and translator. In 1975 he joined the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland, holding a position of a selector of medical literature till 1979.

Broadwin's next working position was at Letterman Army Institute of Research Library in San Francisco, California, where he worked as an administrative librarian from 1979 till 1983. That same year he moved to the Engineering Library of Stanford University, taking a post of a head of a reference and bibliographic instruction till 1988. He also worked at Health Services Library of V.A. Medical Center in Palo Alto, California as a medical librarian during the period 1988-1990. Additionally, he served at the Hubert H. Semans Library of Foothill College as a collection development librarian from 1990.

Besides his activity as a librarian, Broadwin is a well-known translator of numerous books, including nonfiction The Triumph of Propaganda: Film and National Socialism, 1933-1945, written by Hilmar Hoffmann, and Maybe Luck Isn't Just Chance, written by Ruth Liepman.

Achievements

• Broadwin is a recipient of 1963 Edward Frank Kraft Prize from the University of California at Berkeley. Eight years later he won the Alumni Association Award for Academic Distinction from the University of California at Los Angeles. His other honors include the Outstanding Achievement Award from the Department of the Army in 1980, and the Certificate of Achievement Award of Tenure from Foothill College in 1992.

Views

Quotations: "I enjoy the intellectual stimulation of putting someone else’s ideas into my native language, trying to give non-English-speaking writers a voice in idiomatic English, especially if the original is worth the effort. Tim Mason’s Social Policy in the Third Reich was just such a work. It also turned out to be quite a chastening experience. Mason was a British historian who wrote in both English and German. Unlike many in the social sciences, he had a flair for writing. So it was a real challenge to translate him back into a language in which he had already established a reputation as a gifted stylist."

"I have always thought it better to make available a good book by someone else than inflict a poorer book of one’s own. The only sad thing is that translation is still the Cinderella of scholarship. I only hope that, like the heroine of the fairy tale, translation and translators will receive the honor and respect they deserve."

Membership

Broadwin is a member of the Phi Beta Kappa from 1996.

Interests

• reading, crossword puzzles, walking

• Sport & Clubs

  swimming

Connections

Father:

Henry Broadwin

Mother:

Bertyl Muller (Berlin) Broadwin