About

From Classical Languages to a Life in Language

My relationship with language began long before I became involved in Linguistic Validation. I studied Classical Greek Language and Literature and Latin Language and Literature at Masaryk University, graduating with a Master’s degree in Classical Philology.

Working closely with ancient texts taught me something that has remained central to my work ever since: meaning rarely resides in individual words alone. It emerges from grammar, context, convention, structure and interpretation.

That training also taught me to be comfortable with ambiguity. A text does not always offer one obvious answer. Several interpretations may be linguistically possible, and understanding which one is most plausible requires evidence, context and judgement.

Language in Teaching and Translation

Teaching English was a major part of my professional life for many years. From 1993 to 2008, I worked as an English language teacher, and for fifteen years teaching was one of the central strands of my career.

In 1995, I founded the IONA language school in Český Těšín, where I served as its owner and Director of Studies. The school gradually grew to approximately 400 students and a team of 25 teachers.

Teaching allowed me to experience language from a different perspective from the one I had encountered in philology: not only as a system or a text, but as a means of communication that another person needs to understand, acquire and use.

From 1998 onwards, I was simultaneously becoming increasingly involved in professional translation. For a number of years, teaching, running the school and translation therefore developed as parallel strands of my professional life.

During this period, I further expanded my academic and professional background through advanced qualifications in English, interpreting and applied linguistics, including the Cambridge DELTA, the Cambridge Certificate of Proficiency in English and the Czech Special State Examination in English for Interpreting.

I also completed specialist legal studies for translators and interpreters at the Faculty of Law, Masaryk University, and I am a sworn translator for English and Latin under Czech law.

These fields may appear very different — Classical Philology, teaching, translation, interpreting, clinical research and Linguistic Validation — but for me there has always been a clear connection between them.

From Text to People

Over time, my professional work has increasingly taken me into areas where translation alone is not enough.

Working in Linguistic Validation brought together many of the things that had always interested me about language: close reading, conceptual analysis, language in context, differences between apparently equivalent formulations, and the relationship between what a text says and what another person actually understands.

Cognitive Debriefing interviews added another dimension: the opportunity to listen directly to respondents and observe what happens when carefully considered language leaves the page and meets a real person.

This is where my work comes closest to psycholinguistics — to questions of how people process language, construct meaning and interpret what they read or hear.

This perspective has led me to a broader interest in the relationship between language, cognition and interpretation, extending beyond Linguistic Validation itself.

Ultimately, what interests me is not only what words mean, but what they mean to the person reading or hearing them.