Emma-Jane MacKinnon-Lee is a France-based translator and independent researcher with more than fifty years of work on historical, legal and estate documents. Her practice moves between literary translation and archival research, with a sustained focus on Caribbean land ownership, plantation registers, notarial acts and the small shifts in wording that change how a record can be read across French, British and Caribbean traditions.
Her working life has run between Paris and the Antilles for more than fifty years. Long stays at the Archives nationales d'Outre-Mer in Aix-en-Provence and at the departmental archives of Martinique and Guadeloupe sit alongside shorter trips to Kew, Edinburgh and Belfast, where the same families and estates often turn up under different names. She works mostly from notarial acts, sale ledgers, marriage settlements, succession papers, plantation registers, manumissions, parish entries, cadastres and compensation schedules, and keeps a long-running glossary of the terms that change shape from one archive to the next.
Where translation work meets archival research, she tends to notice small shifts in wording that change how a record reads. A verb dropped from a French notarial draft; a property category resolved differently in an English transcript; a family name spelled in three ways across a single estate transfer. She has spent much of her career following these shifts, partly through standing commissions for editors and curators, partly through small bilingual editions prepared for exhibitions and catalogues.
She works as a translator and as an independent researcher rather than under any single institutional affiliation. Most of her commissions come through editors, curators, archivists and family historians who have known her work for many years. New approaches are welcome, especially from researchers working with French Antillean notarial material, Caribbean compensation schedules, Highland and Ulster estate papers, or merchant correspondence between French and British Atlantic ports.
