Mark William

Mark Willan was born in 1953 in Manchester, UK, to an Italian mother and British father. He was brought up bilingual by speaking Italian at home while attending school in the UK. All summer breaks were spent with family in the same place in Italy, which has enabled him to have peer age friends from early childhood.
Languages were his best field of academic study, but after his first B.A., he changed direction entirely and qualified as a Chartered Surveyor, specialising in international commercial real estate across Europe. He also ran a firm of environmental consulting engineers in the Paris region in the early 1990s. After losing capital through fraud in a US (Connecticut) joint venture, and soon after cancer removed his engineering partner, he changed again to technical, financial and legal translation and retrained at Cambridge (C.C.I.C.) in the UK as a simultaneous conference interpreter.

Having served as treasurer on the board of a major IB international school on the French Riviera for a few years, he was invited to move to South-East Asia where he remained until 2017. Since then, he divides his time between Malaysia and Italy, where his home overlooks the apartment in Trieste where James Joyce wrote Ulysses and Dubliners.

Besides being a Chartered Surveyor, he was Treasurer of the Chartered Institute of Linguists Regional Society (France) for 3 years in the 1990s, a Member of the Institute of Management, Official Interpreter of the Supreme Court in Singapore and Sworn Translator/Interpreter at the High Court in Trieste.

He has translated a number of published books from German, French, Italian and English on topics such as : Law (both Napoleonic and Common Law systems), Aviation, Anthroposophy and Self-development.
He continues to write on the last two topics, and these are mainly privately circulated, since they are specialist fields. He rclassifies himself as "Danger: Work-in-progress".

His career has enabled him to meet captains of industry, major political figures, ministers, presidents, prime ministers and one or two celebrities, and some of them have even earned his respect.

He studied at:
Université de Paris V (Sorbonne), France,
Manchester University, (U.K.),
Collegio Ghisleri, Università di Pavia, Italy, and
University of Warwick, (U.K.)