Sault Ste. Marie is a city on the St. Marys River in Ontario, close to the U. S.-Canada border. It is the seat of the Algoma District and the third largest city in Northern Ontario, after Sudbury and Thunder Bay; the Ojibwe, the indigenous Anishinaabe inhabitants of the area, call this area Baawitigong, meaning "place of the rapids." They used this as a regional meeting place during whitefish season in the St. Mary's Rapids. To the south, across the river, is the United States and the Michigan city of the same name; these two communities were one city until a new treaty after the War of 1812 established the border between Canada and the United States in this area at the St. Mary's River. In the 21st century, the two cities are joined by the International Bridge, which connects Interstate 75 on the Michigan side, Huron Street on the Ontario side. Shipping traffic in the Great Lakes system bypasses the Saint Mary's Rapids via the American Soo Locks, the world's busiest canal in terms of tonnage that passes through it, while smaller recreational and tour boats use the Canadian Sault Ste.

Marie Canal. French colonists referred to the rapids on the river as Les Saults de Ste. Marie and the village name was derived from that; the rapids and cascades of the St. Mary's River descend more than 20 ft from the level of Lake Superior to the level of the lower lakes. Hundreds of years ago, this slowed shipping traffic, requiring an overland portage of boats and cargo from one lake to the other; the entire name translates to "Saint Mary's Rapids" or "Saint Mary's Falls". The word sault is pronounced in French, in the English pronunciation of the city name. Residents of the city are called Saultites. Sault Ste. Marie is bordered to the east by the Rankin and Garden River First Nation reserves, to the west by Prince Township. To the north, the city is bordered by an unincorporated portion of Algoma District, which includes the local services boards of Aweres, Batchawana Bay and District, Peace Tree and Searchmont; the city's census agglomeration, including the townships of Laird and Macdonald, Meredith and Aberdeen Additional and the First Nations reserves of Garden River and Rankin, had a total population of 79,800 in 2011.

Native American settlements of Ojibwe-speaking peoples, existed here for more than 500 years. In the late 17th century, French Jesuit missionaries established a mission at the First Nations village; this was followed by development of a fur trading post and larger settlement, as traders and Native Americans were attracted to the community. It was considered one community and part of Canada until after the War of 1812 and settlement of the border between Canada and the US at the Ste. Mary's River. At that time, the US prohibited British traders from any longer operating in its territory, the areas separated by the river began to develop as two communities, both named Sault Ste. Marie. After the visit of Étienne Brûlé in 1623, the French called it "Sault de Gaston" in honour of Gaston, Duke of Orléans, the brother of King Louis XIII of France. In 1668, French Jesuit missionaries renamed it as Sault Sainte Marie, established a mission settlement on the river's south bank. A fur trading post was established and the settlement expanded to include both sides of the river.

Sault Ste. Marie is one of the oldest French settlements in North America, it was at the crossroads of the 3,000-mile fur trade route, which stretched from Montreal to Sault Ste. Marie and to the North country above Lake Superior. A cosmopolitan, mixed population of Europeans, First Nations peoples, Métis lived at the village spanning the river; the city name originates from Saults de Sainte-Marie, archaic French for "Saint Mary's Falls", a reference to the rapids of Saint Marys River. Etymologically, the word sault comes from an archaic spelling of saut, which translates most in this usage to the English word cataract; this in turn derives from the French word for "leap" or "jump". Citations dating back to 1600 use the sault spelling to mean a waterfall or rapids. In modern French, the words chutes or rapides are more usual. Sault survives exclusively in geographic names dating from the 17th century. Traders interacted with tribes from around the Great Lakes, Scots-British fur trader John Johnston, his Ojibwe wife and multi-racial were prominent among all societiies here in the late eighteenth century.

Their daughter, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft married Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, a US Indian agent and early ethnographer, they had children. She has been recognized as writer in the United States; this fluid environment changed during and after the War of 1812 between Britain and the United States. Trade dropped during the war and on July 20, 1814 an American force destroyed the North West Company depot on the north shore of the St. Marys River. Since the Americans were unable to capture Fort Mackinac, the British forces retained control of Sault Ste. Marie; as noted, after the war with a new border defined, the US closed its territory to British Canadian traders, shutting off much interaction. In 1870, the United States refused to give the steamer Chicona, carrying Colonel Garnet Wolseley, permission to pass through the locks at Sault Ste Marie. In order to control their own water passage, the Canadians constructed the Sault Ste. Marie Canal, w

Shaun Whiteside is a Northern Irish translator of French, Dutch and Italian literature. He has translated many novels, including Manituana and Altai by Wu Ming, The Weekend by Bernhard Schlink, Serotonin by Michel Houellebecq, Magdalene the Sinner by Lilian Faschinger, which won him the Schlegel-Tieck Prize for German Translation in 1997. Whiteside was born in County Tyrone in Northern Ireland in 1959, he graduated with a First in Modern Languages at Cambridge. After he finished his studies, he worked as a business journalist and television producer before translating full-time; as he said in a brief interview, "Did I always want to be a translator? I wanted to do something that involved travel and languages, but when my work in television took me to far-off places, I kept coming back to translation, first for fun, as a way of earning a living." Whiteside is the former Chair of the Translators Association of the Society of Authors. He lives in London with his wife and son, where he sits on the PEN Writers in Translation committee, the editorial board of New Books in German, the Advisory Panel of the British Centre for Literary Translation, where he teaches at the summer school.

He has stated that he would like to "have a go at Uwe Tellkamp's Der Turm, a massive great project but a worthwhile one." The Wall by Marlen Haushofer, 1990 Lenin's Brain by Tilman Spengler, 1993 The Birth of Tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche, 1993 Magdalene the Sinner by Lilian Faschinger, 1997, winner of the Schlegel-Tieck Prize Payback by Gert Ledig, 2002 Auschwitz: A History by Sybille Steinbacher, 2004 Mourning and Melancholia by Sigmund Freud, 2005 Manituana by Wu Ming, 2009 Altai by Wu Ming, 2013 Swansong 1945: A Collective Diary of the Last Days of the Third Reich by Walter Kempowski, 2015 Melnitz by Charles Lewinsky, 2015 The Giraffe's Neck by Judith Schalansky, 2015, commended for the Schlegel-Tieck Prize Malacqua: Four Days of Rain in the City of Naples, Waiting for the Occurrence of an Extraordinary Event by Nicola Pugliese, 2017 To Die in Spring by Ralf Rothmann Serotonin by Michel Houellebecq, 2019 Article and review by Whiteside for The Independent Interview with Whiteside by British Centre for Literary Translation Description of Altai at Verso Books Description of Manituana at Verso Books Description of The Wall at Cleis Press

Mark Skaggs is an American video game producer and executive. Skaggs is known for leading the team that created the Facebook game FarmVille for Zynga, leading the team that created CityVille, serving as Executive Producer and product lead for the PC real-time strategy games Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2, Command & Conquer: Generals, The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-earth. Skaggs founded Tetragon, Inc. in 1993, a small company that developed a console game called NanoTek Warrior, released in 1997 through Virgin Interactive. Skaggs and Tetragon worked for GameTek on the PC game Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller. Skaggs joined Westwood Studios as an Executive Producer. After Westwood was acquired by Electronic Arts in 1998, Skaggs oversaw the creation of a series of hit real-time strategy games as Vice President and Executive Producer at EA, his Westwood Studio in Irvine, California became known as EA Pacific. His first major RTS project was Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2, released in 2000, followed by its expansion pack Yuri's Revenge in 2001.

Skaggs led the team making Command & Conquer: Generals, released in 2003, notable because of its high quality 3D graphics and because it established a third product line in the Command & Conquer series. The expansion pack for Generals was called Zero Hour released in 2003. EA Pacific was relocated to Los Angeles in 2003; the last major EA RTS game helmed by Skaggs was The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-earth, released in 2004. In 2005, Skaggs left EA to become COO for Trilogy Studios. Skaggs led the teams that built the Facebook games FarmVille and CityVille, he led teams making other games at Zynga including The Ville, Treasure Isle, the mobile version of Empires & Allies. In 2015, Skaggs left Zynga, he joined India's Moonfrog Labs in 2016 as a game designer and board member, developing mobile games for the Indian market