He graduated as a Bachelor of Arts in French and German at the University of Nottingham in 1960 and obtained a diploma in librarianship at University College London in 1962.
In 2000 he obtained his PhD degree at the University of East Anglia.
In addition to authoring numerous articles in journals and conferences about machine translation since 1963, he is particularly well known by the book An Introduction to Machine Translation (1992) which he co-authored with Harold Somers.
John's service to the machine translation community, most of it after retirement, has been outstanding.
After serving as editor of the UEA Papers in Linguistics, (1976–1982), he was editor of MT News International, the bulletin of the International Association for Machine Translation (1992–1997), president of the European Association for Machine Translation (1995–2004) and of the International Association for Machine Translation (1999–2001), editor of the Compendium of Translation Software (1992–2012).