Ciao!
My name is John Bremer. I'm a computational linguist and translator by training and applied computer researcher and software developer during the day. I've worked in various incarnations of the Boeing Phantom Works Natural Language Processing and Text and Data Mining group since 1989. Boeing is one of the largest publishers in the world and most of the software I write supports the publication work flow and includes the following: Interactive Electronic Technical Manuals, Web-based collaborative document reviewers, Grammar and Style Checkers, utilities for multiword term extraction and translation from parallel corpora. I have studied Arabic, Spanish, Modern Greek, German, Italian and Sicilian.
I'm having a blast creating entries in Wiktionary. I spend several hours each day reading Italian novels and watching Italian TV and the things I read or hear motivate the entries that I'm making. On my last trip to Italy in November 2007 I picked up a bunch of new novels in translation including "The Count of Monte Cristo" and "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" and as I read them in Italian and English I'll be watching for tasty idiomatic and conventionalized phrases and their translations.