He is a corresponding member of the Flemish Academy and an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Manchester’s Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies.
He studied English, German and Dutch at the University of Ghent, (Belgium) and then moved to the United Kingdom for a MA in Literary Translation.
His discourse on the reciprocal internal and external pressures that affect translation norms offer tools that conceptualizes the relationship between structures of power and disciplinary transformation.
He applied Niklas Luhmann's Social Systems Theory (SST), for instance, in his attempt to describe what constitutes translation activity or the accounting for its heteronomy.
[8] Hermans maintained that literal translations have dominated the medieval regime and this view has been supported by other historians such as Peter Burke.