Interpreting
I have been a conference interpreter for more than 35 years, working on high-level and domain-specific assignments for international organisations, trade and labour federations, businesses and the media.
- French
- A
- English
- B
- German
- C
I am EU-accredited and a member of AIIC, the International Association of Conference Interpreters.
Much of my work takes place in the rather peculiar world where politics, law, economics, technology and people all have to make sense simultaneously — and preferably in another language.
Conference Interpreters International
I joined Conference Interpreters International as a Partner in 2012.
I became Cii's Managing Partner in 2026.
Cii provides conference interpreting, multilingual event management and remote interpreting services.
In 2020, I built Cii's dedicated remote interpreting hub in Brussels, using both hardware and software interpreting consoles while deliberately remaining platform-agnostic.
Technology should solve the problem, not become the problem.
Over the years I have become increasingly involved in designing the systems behind the operation: workflow, recruitment, interpreter selection, scheduling, messaging, finance and the less glamorous machinery that makes multilingual events actually happen.
Which inevitably led to writing software.
Software
I have been developing database-driven applications for almost as long as I have been interpreting.
These days that mostly means:
- Python
- PostgreSQL
- Flask
Ipso Facto
In 1996 I started building Ipso Facto, software specifically designed for conference-interpreting operations.
Among other things, it can select interpreters according to language combination, individual and booth-wide coverage, availability, previous assignments, ratings, recruitment preferences and the composition of the rest of the team.
It also manages requests, contracts and scheduling.
Successive versions have been used by organisations including Cii of course, as soon as 1997, but also the Council of Europe and ARTE.
Magic ShERPa
In 2025 I rebuilt the idea from the ground up.
Magic ShERPa is the current generation: a modern, integrated operating platform connecting our proprietary systems with Odoo, email, document storage, calendars, messaging and AI services.
Its purpose is not particularly fashionable:
Fewer clicks, less duplication, better data and more time for humans to do the things humans are actually good at.
Sound
Interpreting has also left me with an occupational interest in audio.
Possibly an unhealthy one.
Voice-over
Give me the original in English or German. I’ll make it sound as though it was meant to be French — professionally translated and localised, recorded, edited and post-produced.
Recording takes place in a sound-isolated StudioBricks booth using microphones by Neumann, Austrian Audio and Sennheiser, SPL preamps and an Apogee Symphony interface.
There is considerably more equipment involved than is strictly necessary.
That is generally how audio works.
Speech-to-speech translation
I am particularly interested in what happens when AI, speech recognition, machine translation and synthetic speech collide with professional interpreting.
I build and benchmark my own speech-translation pipelines: open-weight speech recognition, LLM-based translation and neural speech synthesis, cascaded or end-to-end.
The commercial APIs then go through the same tests.
Under conference conditions: long sessions, real microphones, real terminology.
The interesting question is no longer whether the technology works.
It sort of does.
The interesting questions are where it works, where it fails, how reliably it fails, and whether anyone notices before it matters.
That is the territory in which I increasingly advise clients: use cases, system design, model behaviour, operational risks and the considerable gap between a successful demo and a successful multilingual event.
And when nobody is listening
I photograph wildlife.
Mostly birds, although I try not to hold that against them.
Photography began as a way of looking. It gradually became a way of not looking at other things.
It has taken me to some inconvenient places carrying unreasonable quantities of glass through mud, rain and occasionally katabatic winds.
There are worse ways of spending one's time.
I also:
- write the occasional haiku;
- listen to an unreasonable number of audiobooks;
- harbour plans involving sailing ships, remote islands and species of penguin with extravagant eyebrows.
At some point, I shall vanish aboard the Bark Europa for a good couple of months, sail to Tristan da Cunha and look for Northern Rockhoppers.
There are easier Rockhoppers to get to.
None, however, wears it quite so well.