David Short is Chameleon Translations, along with occasional helpers brought in when there is a heavy workload or languages other than French, Spanish, Italian or Catalan are required.
As a school pupil, David Short learnt French and German, but that was not enough. He taught himself Italian at the age of sixteen, and then Spanish a year later, while also reading widely in the field of phonology and linguistics. He sat GCSE exams in these two languages. The oral test was in each case the first time he had spoken either language to another person. He was commended for his pronunciation and received an A for Italian and a starred A for Spanish.
Once secondary school was over, he went to the University of Bradford to study for a four-year BA in Modern Languages (French and Spanish) based on translation, choosing Dutch and Portuguese as optional modules, and teaching himself Catalan, and then starting Mandarin Chinese. He also took the Trinity Certificate in teaching English to speakers of other languages. The third year of the course was spent on placement abroad: the first six months at the University of Saragossa, studying Spanish language and culture, and teaching English part-time; the last six months being in charge of the language resources library at the Institut Français du Pétrole in Paris. He graduated with excellent grades in translation, and was recognised as one of the most gifted linguists who had passed through the Department of Modern Languages. He then went to Barcelona and took a two-month intensive course at International House Barcelona and the Universitat de Barcelona in teaching Spanish as a foreign language.
The first long stop after graduation was Milan, where he first taught English for Inlingua, then for the MIT Centre. Through the latter agency he taught English to several executives of Coca-Cola Italy. After a few months, he was totally fluent in Italian, and his boss at MIT entrusted him with the task of translating some newsclippings for Coca-Cola. On seeing the speed and quality of his work, he put David in charge of translating all press material from Italian into English, a daily task that had previously been divided between several people. David continued to be the press translator for Coca-Cola Italy for one year before deciding to move to Bordeaux, where he set up Chameleon Translations, translating from French for various clients. After living in Valencia (Spain) for a year, he moved to Melbourne to settle down with his Australian fiancée. In Melbourne, he has done part-time teaching work with a variety of institutions, training immigrants in academic English.
Since 2000, David has always maintained at least a few private students on the side for language tuition, even including beginner's Latin on occasion.
He has been an active member (membership №. 5346) of Australian Mensa since 2007.
David also has considerable computing skills, having an in-depth knowledge of many applications, and also of website design. This site was designed by him according to World Wide Web Consortium XHTML standards. He is currently expanding his knowledge of Unix/Linux programming and software packaging.