My translation career began in Montreal in the early 1980s when, in the course of several summer and part-time jobs, I was responsible for translating into French the various business documentation and form letters for various Canadian and American companies doing business in Montreal (insurance, banking, transportation, mortgage), in order to conform to the new language laws in the province of Quebec.

After that came a stint translating Hungarian texts into English for clients of several agencies, for court and legal cases, and for a Hungarian secondary school in Germany.

My first full-time job was as editor and translations reviser for the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, published by the University of Toronto Press. I then obtained a doctorate in history (medieval Europe) and taught for 11 years as assistant professor (tenured) at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario.

I then upped sticks and moved to Belgium to work as a researcher, editor and translator for an academic institute for family and marriage studies. During this time I began to develop my freelance clientele in European institutions and universities (specialising mainly in academic articles and books in the areas of history, anthropology, law, art history and theory, urban design, transport geography, education, business and human resources, as well as speeches and documents by the Hungarian Members of European Parliament).

I also chalked up some experience as an in-house project manager and translator/reviser with a translation agency based in Flanders (IGTV, in Grimbergen), where I was responsible for recruitment and Quality Assurance for all English-language freelancers.

Since September 2006 I have been on the staff of the translation division of the Belgian Banking, Finance and Insurance Commission (CBFA), now the Financial Services and Markets Authority (FSMA), the regulator of the financial markets in Belgium.

Between November 2012 and November 2013 I spent a sabbatical year working as an in-house editor and translator at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, as a senior fellow in the newly established Department of Law and Anthropology.