In the language services, I strictly adhere to the principle of translating and interpreting into one's mother language. Consequently, I handle a limited number of combinations. My mother languages are English and Tagalog, whereby English is the dominant language. I translate and interpret mainly from Spanish, French, German, English and Tagalog into either of these two.

By academic background and training, I specialise in art, where I hold a PhD. I translate articles on painting, sculpture, architecture and art history and theory. I have also done work in museology, translated catalogues, and edited a book on art education. My theoretical and practical experience in archaeology and anthropology comes from my doctoral fieldwork in India, where I got hands-on experience.

One good thing always leads to another: in 1986, a science and technology research on indigenous arts, crafts and lifeways that I was involved in found its way to a UNESCO working group on Cultural Rights and Jurisprudence in Darusalaam, Brunei. This was not my "first brush with the law", so to speak, having been born into the fourth generation of a family of lawyers and magistrates. In fact, I rather feel I was elected spokesperson for culture on the basis of DNA: there was no one else in the art group with sufficient background to tackle the jurists. My interest in law probably dates back to coffee-table conversations between my father, uncles and aunt, presided over by a portrait of grandpa who was a Supreme Court Justice. It was further stimulated by Dad's need for a secretary at home - or more properly put, he frowned upon secretaries in general because what he needed were para-legal assistants. I was, unofficially, one of them.

Another of my interests is psychology, which also ran in the family. A psychiatrist uncle crossed over from being a military medic-trainor to industrial psychology and took me on his staff. This is another long story lasting some two years, but, to this day, psychology remains one of my passions, and led to my being named a fellow (or is that ironic) to a foundation specialising in women's studies.

In the meantime, I have kept up relatively well with information technology and telecommunications, not only through the amount of translation work I do in these fields, but also through the exercise of building a new computer every four years (my own version of the renovation rites of the Ise Temple in this day and age).

Evidently, I neither specialise in everything, nor do I work in every language combination. Should you need to be referred, I have prepared a page that features links to my most respected associates.