John began his career, more than 35 years ago, working for the Translation Service of the New Zealand Department of Internal Affairs. John has degrees in French (PhD) and Russian.

Although John specialises in over 25 western and eastern European languages, he also provides critical linguistic editorial contributions to many of our Pasifika projects.  John regularly attends and contributes to industry conferences, locally and overseas.

About his work philosophy, he says: ‘I believe that, wherever possible, the translated text should read as smoothly and naturally as the source document. During the years when I often worked as an interpreter, I developed the credo of “interpret with the accuracy of a translator, and translate with the fluency of an interpreter”. Pursuit of this aim has led to a close interest in contrastive linguistics and cognitive semantics.’