This site uses cookies.
Some of these cookies are essential to the operation of the site,
while others help to improve your experience by providing insights into how the site is being used.
For more information, please see the ProZ.com privacy policy.
Freelance translator and/or interpreter, Verified site user
Data security
This person has a SecurePRO™ card. Because this person is not a ProZ.com Plus subscriber, to view his or her SecurePRO™ card you must be a ProZ.com Business member or Plus subscriber.
Affiliations
This person is not affiliated with any business or Blue Board record at ProZ.com.
After graduating from London University in Classical Persian (1965) I spent the next 20 years or so working in Tehran as a translator and writer, and later studying part-time for a doctorate at Tehran University in the field of linguistics. I translated important publications for many Government departments and agencies, such as Bank Markazi Iran, Plan Organization, the Ministry of Culture and Arts... Since then I have done a lot of freelance translation, ranging from personal documentation to commercial contracts and work for the UN on the future Constitution of Afghanistan. I believe I am the only member of the Chartered Institute of Linguists with a distinction in Persian (1983) and in 1993 I was elected a Fellow of the Institute. I now live near Barcelona, working as a journalist and translating from Persian, Spanish and Catalan into English. I am proficient in most subjects, particularly banking, oil and gas, agriculture, legal and general economics, and human rights.
I have recently added Czech-English to my language pairs, as I spend the winter months in Prague and now know Czech well enough to work from.
There's probably no-one alive today who has translated into mother-tongue English as much Persian as I have. Even when I was in jail in Tehran's Evin prison (1985-91), accused of being a British spy, a senior cabinet minister kept me busy translating his writings on Islamic jurisprudence! I now charge a bit more than the pittance he paid me, but there wasn't much to spend it on in jail. I still do some translations for free, chiefly on matters relating to asylum-seeking and human rights abuses, although thankfully these are becoming rarer. Poetry, too, when it comes my way.
By the way, I don't like the word Farsi for the national language of Iran and Afghanistan. We have the lovely traditional English word for the language, literature, cats, carpets, art, architecture...Persian. So let's use it! We don't say: 'He's learning francais' or 'She understands Deutsch', so why bring Farsi into it when communicating in English?
