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Editor:  gsandi

Name:	Gabor Sandi
Email:	Send to gsandi
Home Page:	www.tundria.com

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Profile

I was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1950. My parents were professional people - my father a research chemist, my mother a librarian. I lived in Budapest until 1964, my childhood thus including the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 (which I still remember, sort of). I started to learn English, privately, at the age of 10.

I moved with my parents to Accra, Ghana, West Africa, in 1964. I had my secondary education there, in English, at the Ghana International School, obtaining a GCE "O" level diploma in 1967. I had one year of a pre-science university course at the University of Ghana, Legon, 1967-1968.

In 1968 my parents decided to emigrate to Canada, rather than return to Hungary. My first university in Canada was McGill, in Montreal, where I studied first-year science (the physics course there was superb!). After one year, I transfered to Carleton University in Ottawa, where I obtained a BSc in Mathematics in 1971 and a BA in Linguistics (my real love as an academic discipline) in 1972. By this time I was reasonably fluent in French and Spanish, in addition to English and my native Hungarian.

I continued to study Linguistics at the graduate level at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Vancouver, obtaining my MA in 1976 (my thesis was on the phonology of the dialects of England). I also studied Japanese for three years - in addition, I spent a summer in Japan as part of a student exchange programme with students of D?sha University in Kyoto.

After finishing my MA courses, I took a year off, working for the National Library of Canada as a multilingual abstractor. Seeing that libraries, unlike the pure humanities, offered a reasonable opportunity to earn a living, I decided to return to university (and to UBC) to study librarianship. Enjoyable interludes in my studies were a 2-week practicum at the library of the University of California at Santa Barbara, and a summer job at CISTI, Canada's National Science Library in Ottawa. I received my MLS (Master of Library Science) in 1978, and I got my first "real" job at the Scarborough Public Library (in suburban Toronto) in 1979.

In 1982 I met and married my wife Barbara. Almost at the same time my scientific, linguistic and abstracting capabilities were "discovered" by CIS, the Occupational Safety and Health Information Service of the International Labour Organization (ILO) in Geneva, Switzerland. I was invited to sit for an exam of scientific translation and abstracting, which I seem to have passed, and I was offered a job with CIS.

In the summer of 1983 I came to Europe with my wife to see if we wished to accept the job offer. I took this opportunity to take my wife Barbara, who was pregnant, to Hungary to introduce her to the culture I had been born into. It was quite an experience for her, as she had never been to a communist country (which it then was). She also met my grandfather, a medical doctor past his 90th year.

Having checked the ILO out in Geneva, I decided to accept the job offer, and I have worked for the ILO ever since. We decided to live not in Geneva, but in a small nearby town on the French side of the border called Ferney-Voltaire. My two sons were born in this environment, Patrick in 1984, Robert in 1989.

Abstracting is a quiet occupation that one does steadily from day to day. It left enough time in the evenings to grow with the home computing revolution, progressing from the Apple II that we got for each other with Barbara as a mutual wedding present, past the Macintosh in 1985, into the PC world from the mid 90s. By 1997 I was connected to the Internet through the French Wanadoo system.

In 1998 I was yanked out of abstracting and promoted to be Deputy Director of the ILO's Office in New Delhi, India. A very different job, indeed, one that enabled me to live on my fourth continent, and gave me the opportunity to study yet another language with a different script, namely Hindi.

A side benefit of being in New Delhi was the possibility to organize a round-the-world "home leave" to Toronto. From Delhi, we came to Europe to visit friends and relatives in Geneva and Budapest, spend some time in London, cross the Atlantic to visit Toronto, Edmonton (where my father and sister live) and Vancouver, and then return to India via San Francisco, Tokyo and Hong Kong.

The Indian escapade did not last long. By 2000 I was back in Geneva, as Editor-in-Chief of the bilingual CIS abstracting journal, and its associated database.

We don't live in Ferney any more but in the next little French town, called Prévessin-Moëns. Technology has, however, improved - we have an ADSL connection for our Internet!

Aside from linguistics and the Internet, my hobbies include bridge (the card game), badminton, science fiction, imaginary countries and languages, and what I call the three T's (trams, trains and tigers). Trams and trains can be amply sampled around Geneva, while in India I had the pleasure to see a tiger in the wild from the top of an elephant.