Experience and interests

More than twenty five years of work in linguistics and translation in a rich multi-cultural environment have led to a strong interest in cross-cultural communication and translation. My wife is from Finland, I am German and we have lived for about twenty years in Ethiopia and seven years in the UK, working with colleagues from Britain, Denmark, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, America, New Zealand as well as Ethiopia.

My main affiliation is with SIL International where I work as an international translation consultant and researcher. In Ethiopia I worked as research associate and lecturer at the Addis Ababa University. In the UK, I was an Honorary Lecturer at the Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies (CTIS, 2000 – 2002), and an Honorary Senior Research Fellow of the Department of Phonetics and Linguistics, University College London (2001-2004).

My interest in cross-cultural communication is cognitive-explanatory, rather than descriptive. Central issues for me are how our minds manage the complexities of cross-cultural communication, what mental faculties determine the possibilities as well as the limitations in this area. In my research over the last fifteen years, I have found the cognitive-inferential paradigm developed by D. Sperber and D. Wilson most fruitful, leading to very encouraging results and allowing not only explanation but also prediction regarding cross-cultural acts of communication (see bibliography). Since 1998 I have been carrying out a research program into foundational notions of translation for SIL International. Currently this research is being written up in a new book.