Mireille K.

Mireille grew up trilingual in Geneva — French at home, German in school, English from her Welsh grandmother — and trained first as a pharmacist before the precision of language pulled harder than the precision of dosages. She pivoted into conference interpreting, spending a decade in glass booths translating diplomats who never finished their sentences. Mandarin came late and obsessively: a posting near the UN's Chinese delegation, then night classes, then a year in Chengdu that rearranged her ear entirely. She found danmei during a hospital stay in 2016, reading 「188」-style serials on her phone to stay sane, and started translating privately because the official renderings flattened the ache out of every confession scene. She founded Lanting & Co. in 2020 after years of solo fan work, partly to give younger translators the editorial mentorship she never had. She is exacting, allergic to sentimentality-as-shortcut, and believes restraint is the loudest thing on a page.