A native of the United States, he lived in Finland for a total of fourteen years, taking three university degrees there and serving as a lecturer in English at the University of Jyväskylä (1975–81) and a professor of American language and literature (1983–87) and of Finnish–English translation theory and practice (1987–89) at the University of Tampere. During his 21 years (1989–2010) as professor of English at the University of Mississippi, he also spent two years in Voronezh, Russia, and five months in Spain; the last three years at Ole Miss he was Director of First-Year Writing. From 2010 to 2012 he served as Tong Tin Sun Chair Professor of English and head of the English department at Lingnan University. He is the author of The Translator's Turn (Johns Hopkins UP, 1991), Translation and Taboo (Northern Illinois UP, 1996), What Is Translation? (Kent State UP, 1997), Becoming a Translator (Routledge, 1997, 2003, 2012), Translation and Empire (St. Jerome, 1997), Western Translation Theory from Herodotus to Nietzsche (St. Jerome, 1997), Who Translates? (SUNY Press, 2001), and Translation and the Problem of Sway (John Benjamins, 2011).