I started my career in translation after taking a degree in Modern Languages and adding a Postgraduate Diploma in Interpreting and Translation, both for French and German. My first employer was a famous engineering company on Lake Constance in southern Germany. There, I specialised in gearing and machining technologies for the automotive business. After this, I was headhunted by a translation agency in the same town, where I learned to work with other translation fields for clients in the power press industries for wood and metalworking. This is also where I first began doing military translations. At the end of the 1990s, I became self-employed. After 5 years back in the UK, I moved to Portugal where I lived until 2014, during which time I learned Portuguese and began doing PT-EN translations. From 2014 until Russia's invasion in 2022, I lived in Kharkiv, Ukraine; during this period I added RU and UKR languages to my translation portfolio. Following the invasion in 2022, I brought my family back to live in Portugal.