After more than forty years spent teaching English as a foreign language in various French establishments ranging from secondary school to university level, I ended my career as Director of International Relations in one of France's top Engineering Colleges.
In that capacity it was my responsibility to initiate, set up, develop, monitor and assess staff and student exchange programmes with a large number of industrial and academic institutions all over the world.
As I had to "sell" my college abroad, it was absolutely necessary to use documents in English; since none of these were available when I took up the job, I started to translate technical, administrative and publicity brochures to underpin my presentations abroad. This is how it all started... Then a number of my colleagues came to me asking either to help with the writing of their research papers or translate their articles and even their books sometimes...
And then I found out that translating technical and scientific documents could be of interest although my background is related to literature.