Johnston Text & Training

I am a native speaker of English with an excellent (near-native) command of Dutch. I have university degrees from both the United States and the Netherlands, where I have lived since 1985.

Thanks to my work experience in a variety of professional environments and my wide-ranging personal interests, I am familiar with the terminology and stylistic conventions of a broad spectrum of sectors.

Three years of teaching Dutch-to-English translation techniques to third-year bachelors students at ITV Hogeschool voor Tolken en Vertalen  (2015–2018) helped to sharpen my own understanding of what makes certain translation choices preferable to others.

Five years (1998–2003) of working as an in-house translator and English editor at the renowned Dutch management-consulting firm Berenschot provided invaluable experience in making the content and formulation of reports, presentations, tenders, and other commercial and technical texts more cohesive and more easily accessible for readers in a business context.

My most rigorous training in the art of translation was without doubt my PhD research (1992–1998) on the 15th-century Low Saxon translations of the Old Frisian legal texts found in a late-medieval Dutch manuscript. After carefully analyzing the various mistakes made by the early 15th-century translator and the scribes who subsequently copied his work, I was able to draw firm conclusions about both the content and form of the original Old Frisian versions of those texts, only one of which has survived as such. In addition to a critical, annotated edition of these medieval translations, I also provided a translation of each text in modern English.