Andrei Valerievich Kokov

Born in 1963 in Vologda - an over 800 years old Russian town 500 km north of Moscow. The town has population about 300 000 inhabitants and serves as administrative center of Vologda province (population 1,3 mln). There I lived until I moved to Helsinki, Finland in 1991, after being married to Johanna Rekunen.
Children: Aleksi, born in 1993; Elina, born in 1998.

Studies

In Russia after secondary school I studied at Vologda Polytechnic Institute in 1980-85 (electric power department, full-time student of machinery automation and mechanization line for 4.5 years) and obtained a diploma in electromechanical engineering.
In Finland I studied at Riihimäki Commercial College (Business studies for engineers, 700 h of evening and weekend school, 1994) and Hyvinkää-Riihimäki Adult Professional School (PC network ADP support, 400 h of evening school, 1997).

Jobs

In Russia during my student time in 1980-85 it was I worked in different places as a joiner, a carpenter, an agricultural worker, etc. At the same time I trained myself to work as a freelance journalist for local papers.
After graduation from institute, I worked in 1985-89 at the Vologda optical-mechanical plant as a system administrator and an application programmer at PDP-11 minicomputers of the electronic and mechanical CAD division. My next employer in 1989-91 was more peculiar, the Contact Lens Correction Laboratory under the Regional Ophtalmology Clinic. I worked as the Laboratory's optical engineer (produced soft contact lenses) and at the same time maintained the multiuser minicomputer system of the Clinic.
In Finland, due to the economic decline of 1991-95 and over 20% unemployment rate I had very poor chances to get a position of an engineer. There were over 200 programmers and over 300 operators seeking for jobs at the Helsinki employment bueareu, so it obviously wasn't any advance that a person from collapsed Soviet Union had skills in Fortran and Pascal programming for out-of-date RSX11M operating system. However, since 1991 I have been employed as a full-time office worker, running a Macintosh database (with such specialities as FileMaker Pro and 4thDimension), supporting a local PC network based on Windows NT server and TCP/IP protocol and implementing new software and hardware for a Finnish Christian charity mission and publishing company.

Simultaneously I have worked as a translator and interpreter, mainly for Finnish companies exporting technical supplements and technology to Russia (building industry, productive machines and equipment, electric components etc) and municipality of Riihimaki. I also worked as a subcontractor for some Finnish translation offices (e.g. Translation World in Helsinki, East West Idea (Hyvinkää/Porvoo) and Translatum in Tampere). This translation activity has grew up to a separate business since 1997.
 

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Language skills

Russian is not merely my mother tongue but a bit more, due to the fact that during my school years and also later I loved both modern and classical Russian literature very much, reading a lot and writing poems myself as well as newspaper articles, too. Most of written articles were published in "Krasny Sever", Vologda regional newspaper. Member of Journalist Union of Russia.
English was learnt by me a little better than the average Soviet school level presumes; there wasn't much opportunity to communicate in English, but I always had some reading practice both in technical and fiction literature. It was English with which I found that I really have some useful linguistic skills.
Finnish is the language I learnt "on site", living already in Finland since 1991, mainly through English. In fact, I did it pretty quickly, so that in 1993 I already started to act as a Finnsih-Russian interpreter.
German is the language I studied in 1994 at Riihimäki Commercial College, actually the beginnings of it. The foreign language courses there, including Swedish, were arranged for Finns in Finnish. Now I can say that I can read some basic texts both in Swedish and German.
Bulgarian is a language I studied just for my own fun. In the 1980s I was able to read newspapers and books rather freely, and even to communicate in Bulgarian, but by now it is mainly a sort of key to understand my native language - Russian - better.

- to the CrossContact english page.