Our Affiliations

GLS is a corporate member of the American Translators Association (ATA) and the Northwest Translators & Interpreters Society (NOTIS), a regional chapter of the ATA. GLS is a charter member of the Seattle chapter of the German American Chamber of Commerce.

GLS founder and executive director, Courtney Searls-Ridge, is an active individual member of the ATA. She has served on the ATA Board of Directors as director, secretary, chair of the Honors and Awards Committee, and is the current co-chair of the ATA Mentoring Program. She served as president of NOTIS from 1992-1994. Courtney is a member of the Advisory Board of the Department of Germanics, University of Washington. She helped to establish the Translation & Interpretation Institute in 1994, in order to contribute her experience to the training of future industry professionals. The T&I Institute offers the most comprehensive translation and interpretation training program in the Pacific Northwest and is one of only a few such programs in the U.S.

GLS managing director, Maia Costa, is an active member of the ATA, certified in German-to-English translation. She is an ATA certification grader for German to English and deputy language chair for the German-to-English grader team.

GLS maintains close ties with various translating and interpreting programs at German colleges and universities, most recently in Erlangen (Institut für Fremdsprachen und Auslandskunde), Munich (Sprachen & Dolmetscher Institut), and Cologne (Institut für Translation und Mehrsprachige Kommunication).