Graduated from the Faculty of Philology of Leningrad State University with a degree in Teaching Russian as a Foreign Language in 1988. He has freelanced as an English-Russian translator since 1989. He specializes in a wide range of subjects including education, arts and culture, business, management, marketing, advertising, sports, environmental protection, law, banking, real estate, public administration, and various international cooperation programmes. Since 2000 he has also worked as a translation project coordinator, reviser, language consultant and translation test evaluator, scoring an annual volume of translation and revision of over 500,000 words.

In 1991, Sergei Afonin co-founded the Institute of Foreign Languages (IFL), one of the first non-state tertiary institutions in Russia. Since that time he has served as Academic Director of IFL’s Department of English, overseeing EFL and T&I programmes, as well as lecturer/instructor in translation and translation theory. In 2008, he joined the St. Petersburg School of Conference Interpreting in the capacity of a translation trainer.