Marco Cevoli
Technical translator, graphic designer, joiner-of-dots

Born in Rome in 1972, he graduated in Foreign Languages and Literatures at the Catholic University of Brescia and holds a Master’s Degree in Multimedia Design and Production from La Salle University in Barcelona, Spain. After working in various different professions, he began his career as a freelance technical translator in 1997. He then went on to hold various positions with multinationals and small to medium-sized companies in the sector. He founded Qabiria in 2008. He is a regular speaker at conferences for translators and also works with Italian and Spanish universities and training centres, giving courses on technology used in the profession.
"In order to avoid translating", he throws himself into a thousand miscellaneous projects that result in, among others: an illustrated dictionary of phobias in app format for smartphones, a mandala book for colouring in, the first OmegaT manual (written together with Sergio), the well-known software for translators, and a pseudo-tourist guide to Barcelona. Never slowing down, he even decided to finish a novel he had started in his youth, Uziversitari. In early 2017 he published a manual for translators, The Irreplaceable Translator and in 2018 Trovare tutto su internet - Strategie, strumenti e trucchi per la ricerca online (How to Find Everything on The Internet: Tricks, Tools and Tips for Online Research) together with Alessandra Ghiazza.
Married with two children, he currently resides in Badalona, on the outskirts of Barcelona, five minutes from the sea and within walking distance of the sports hall where the original Dream Team USA won their Olympic gold medal and where, just as importantly, Marco met his future wife. He spends his days perpetually connected to the internet, between translations, book drafts and impossible projects, occasionally harassed by his cat Leo.
Marco has written the following for Qabiria’s blog:
What is Markdown and how to use it
If you are a content creator and have not been living in a cave for the past fifteen years you should know t...
What is a video maker doing in Qabiria?
After the fantastic welcome given to the previous interviews, we continue the series of meetings with our mo...
Translating, skiing, traveling...
We continue the cycle of interviews dedicated to our most regular collaborators, through which we want to show...
How to count, edit and translate PDF files
Files in PDF are tough to edit and translate. For a PDF to be translated, it will need to be converted to...
Weights, translations, survival expeditions and opera
This week we begin a series of interviews dedicated to our most loyal collaborators, through which we want to...
Let’s take stock and recap 2021
Useless preamble with embedded rant that you can also skip In the early days of the year, I find my inbox...
Image SEO
The discipline of SEO, the optimisation of web content for search engines, includes many aspects: Technica...
The secret of Squid Game’s success
Squid Game is a South Korean television series, written and directed by Hwang Dong-hyuk and distributed by...
The Translation Journey
Have you ever wondered about the journey a file goes on when you send a file in for translation? Transla...
The struggles of internationalising a web app
Let’s get this straight: for so many startups, translation is the least of the problems. It’s unusual for a...