Francis Howlett looking smug in front of the Spree with the Berliner Dom in the backgroundFrancis Howlett

Now very much retired and enjoying a life spent partly in Bromley and partly in Berlin, and particularly enjoying watching our growing number of grandchildren growing up, I still do some work, almost entirely taken up with translating. My IT days and web management days seem long ago now, and my days in the world of Education even longer, but I still follow this world with interest.

My translation work is shared with my wife Maria. We usually translate from German to English, where our combined strengths are particularly useful in ensuring that we have fully understood the meaning of the original text (Maria is a native German speaker) and that the English is fully idiomatic. Having each other to proof-read our work allows an additional level of rigour to our work, which is undertaken with the highest level of professional care and attention. We occasionally see our work in official documents or hear the gist of our translations of press releases on radio broadcasts. Most of the work is somewhat transient - a web page, a press release, a newsletter, read today, gone tomorrow. Some of it has been published in book form, where we appear as a foot note or in the acknowledgement section. One lengthy and phenomenally technical translation led to the award of a post-doctoral thesis for the original author and ultimately to a change in EU standards in the construction industry.

Most of our translation work is for organisations in South Tyrol, where German is very much in use. The bi-lingual nature of this region means that we often find ourselves tackling small amounts of Italian as well.

We have translated for tourist organisations, museums, art galleries and business and technical institutions as well as for a higher educational institution. Translating for an art gallery in South Tyrol led to some more extensive work for an art gallery in Austria.

If you are interested in the kind of work we do, please contact me.

Publications which might be available for purchase

Background

My background is in Education. I taught in secondary schools for many years, and then I worked at NCET - Becta - on a variety of projects to do with the use of ICT in teaching and learning. On leaving Becta I undertook a number of projects including web site support. I edited existing sites, tinkered with them to improve the way that they displayed, re-wrote them, and then later I began to develop web sites from scratch. For the technically minded, these sites included flat HTML sites, sites with PHP routines, sites which were largely running out of MySQL databases using Perl or PHP routines. There were sites which ran on Apache servers, sites on a First Class server and even on an IIS server with ASP, and there were several examples which exploited Digital Brain's London Grid for Learning routines. As web expectaions for accessibility increased, many of these sites were then completely re-written to be accessible and to display successfully on the full range of devices from small smartphones through tablets to full-scale PCs.

As I am no longer selling these services I have removed all my boaster links, but if anyone needs access to ancient archived educational materials from the Talent Consortium or Lewisham Literacy Strategy, please contact me for the link.

Previous Projects:

Archive of current sites which some visitors might need to find:

I share, with three other brothers and one sadly deceased sister, the immense privilege of being a child of Dr Jack Howlett. There's an item I wrote about him which first appeared on MirandaNet (archive site) and a link to a video of the reconstructed Differential Analyser in action. If you are interested in the convoluted history of the Howlett Family, also known as Vaughan and even as Beales, as well as the history of my mother's side of the family (Simmons) then you need to get in touch with my brother Graham Howlett who has constructed the most amazingly detailed analysis of my family's roots as well as those of his wife, covering the Dugan, Penney, Lloyd, Blake and Balfour family names. For obvious reasons, the detailed parts of his site are password protected, but if you have a legitimate reason for finding out more, there are links on the 'Dugans et al - Genealogical Journeys' web site to help you obtain entry.

Valid CSS!   Valid HTML 5   Cynthia Tested!