I have been one of the world's foremost translators of the Czech language since the early 1980s with many published books to my name. I was personal translator to the President of the Czech Republic, Václav Havel, whose writings I was translating during the last decade of the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia, when I translated other banned authors and was the permanent translator for the Czechoslovak Documentation Centre for the Promotion of Independent Literature based at Scheinfeld, Bavaria.