[3] During his tenure at California Monthly, he received the Council for Advancement and Support of Education's 1993 gold medal for Best Article of the Year in higher education reporting for "TKO in Sociology," the story of French sociology professor Loïc Wacquant who spent four years studying boxers in the Chicago ghetto.

[18][19] After a decade at California Monthly, Rodarmor accepted a position as the top editor of a web-based business publication, Links to Solutions.

He found the new position to be challenging but exciting, starting with a pool of "underpaid" freelance writers of varying skills.

"[20][21] In 2001, as part of the dot-com crash the publication went bankrupt, propelling him back into the world of freelance writing and editing.

He started with Bernard Moitessier’s round-the-world saga The Long Way  [fr] in 1973,[2][3] and continued the stories of sailing adventures with Tamata and the Alliance in 1995[5] and A Sea Vagabond’s World in 1998.

Between 2014 and 2016, Rodarmor reeled off five spy thrillers by Gérard de Villiers, whose CIA contractor hero Malko Linge has been compared to that of Ian Fleming's James Bond.

[26][27] Rodarmor has also translated a series of time-travel books by Guillaume Prévost [fr; fa; it; pt] and novels by Katherine Pancol.

"[31][32] The Wall Street Journal in its review of de Villiers' The Madmen of Benghazi said that Rodarmor's English translation "is actually better than the original.

"[5] A. Bowdoin Van Riper in reviewing The Fate of the Mammoth by Claudine Cohen [fr] said of the translation that it "reads smoothly and introduces only occasional infelicities.

Joshua Armstrong writing for the Los Angeles Review of Books said that "veteran translator William Rodarmor does a good job capturing this tone, deftly transposing the slangy French dialogue into its 1990s English equivalent.

"[36] Similarly, Boyd Tonkin writing for the Financial Times notes that "Rodarmor’s salty and supple translation lends to Anthony and his pals the smartass, vulnerable voices of American, not British, rust-belt teens.

"[37] O'Keeffe writing for The Times Literary Supplement said "Mathieu’s handling of quotidian and often gritty subjects is disconcertingly lyrical, and it is rendered well by William Rodarmor’s translation.

"[38] On the other hand, Thomas Chatterton Williams writing for The New York Times deemed that the narrative had been "somewhat ineptly translated.

[42] He says that his goal is "to produce a text so smooth that the reader isn’t aware it’s a translation"[41] and that it should read like a book the original author would have written if he were fluent in English.

[44][48] In 2001 he received an honorary mention from the Mildred L. Batchelder Award, bestowed by the American Library Association for his translation of Ultimate Game, by Christian Lehmann [fr].

[53][54][55][56] The Albertine Prize, co-presented by Van Cleef & Arpels and the French Embassy, recognizes American readers’ favorite French-language fiction title recently translated into English.