Cristiano Mazzei

Cristiano Mazzei is lecturer and director of translator and interpreter training in LLC. He is originally from São Paulo, Brazil, where he finished his BA in Translation and Interpreting at Unibero University and pursued a career as a business translator and interpreter for the next 20 years, holding positions as staff, freelance, and business owner. In 2005, Mazzei came to the University of Massachusetts Amherst and completed his MA in Translation Studies in 2007, with a thesis titled “Queering Translation Studies”. A chapter of that thesis was published in 2014 as the article “How Adolfo Caminha’s Bom-Crioulo Was ‘Outed’ through its Translated Paratext” in A Companion to Translation Studies, edited by Sandra Bermann and Catherine Porter. Mazzei enrolled in the Ph.D. program in Comparative Literature in 2007 at Umass Amherst, where he remained until spring 2010.

Since 2010, Mazzei has been building, teaching, and promoting programs focused on training community translators and interpreters to facilitate communication of limited-English-speaking (LEP) populations in different settings, including healthcare, courts, schools, and public services in general.

Cristiano is a nationally CoreCHIA certified healthcare interpreter, certified court interpreter by the National Center for State Courts, certified by the US State Department as translator and interpreter, and certified translator and interpreter for the state of São Paulo, Brazil, in Portuguese and English.

His main academic research interests include representations of queer subcultures, identity formation through translation and interpreting, and the intersections of translation and interpreting studies, queer, postcolonial, and performance theories. His most recent research focus is interprofessional training across different disciplines, co-authoring articles on the topic such as "Working With Interpreters as a Team in Health Care," published in MeEd Portal in 2020. He speaks Portuguese, Spanish, and some Italian.