I have used English as my primary foreign language since 1982. During my 30+ years of practical language experience, I managed to soon reach a business fluent level in English. My language skills benefited greatly from numerous business and vacation trips to English-speaking countries, mostly to the United Kingdom and the United States.
In 1982, when I started to work for a US-headquartered non-profit organization, I took over the position of the IT Manager for Europe. My responsibilities included mainly IT Planning & Operations in the UK, The Netherlands, Finland, Germany, Switzerland and Austria. As far as communication among offices across language areas was concerned, the European offices used English (UK English) as working language.
The year 1985 was marked by the start of my career as an independent IT consultant. I used English very extensively during the many years until I voluntarily liquidated my company by the end of 2012. At times, I have worked in multinational teams, where English was used as the working language.
The lion's share of the specialist literature that I read and used throughout my career, approx. 90+ %, was available solely in English, due to timeliness of information. For the same reason, and to reach an international audience, a large portion of the documents and papers that I authored were written in English. As a result, I can look back on a longtime interpretation and translation experience. In particular, I am very familiar with the IT-specific vocabulary of the past and present.
Within the IT domain, for the past 10 years I focused on software architectures, business process management, requirements management, and data management.
During my professional career, I authored and developed
• articles, which were published in English speaking IT-oriented publications;
• studies in English, which were marketed commercially;
• a comprehensive requirements repository;
• software documentation (e.g. user documentation);
• the comprehensive website for my company;
• technical and marketing-oriented documents upon client order.
In addition, I was a speaker at various events with English speaking audiences. All of my talks were IT related.
For most of the documents that I authored in English, I used US English grammar and spelling.
For quite some time, I am collaborating with two graduate translators. So far, I did translations from English into German, within as well as outside the IT domain (e.g. mechanical engineering). Source texts were from different fields, such as technical instructions, e-learning courses, and websites.
German is my native language. My language competence meets the highest standard.