Domingo, or Dom as he is known to his students at the Goethe-Institut Manila, is a Filipino from Manila, Philippines. Coming from a country with very little connection to Germany, he got attracted to learning German from watching war movies, usually Hollywood movies, in which the Germans were often vilified. He wanted to understand the perspective from the other side.
He started as a student at the Goethe-Institut Philippinen and eventually became a German Language Teacher upon taking the German Teacher Training Program of the same institute ten years ago in 2014.
Even as a language student he started translating titles and abstracts mostly from medical and scientific journals published by Elsevier. He has a medical background so that helped but without formal training in translation, he finds difficulty in translating false friends or words with double meanings, idiomatic expressions, and other creative licenses adhered to by the original writers. He believes translation requires not only a certain mastery of at two languages, the source and the output, but a certain grasp of the cultural aspects and Intercultural differences of these languages.