The ATA Chronicle - January/February 2017 - 26


OUR WORLD OF WORDS continued
the copyeditor for most of them, I guess
because my first wife was Swedish,
though I didn't speak the language.
Of course, a copyeditor's job is not
limited to correcting grammar and making
sure all the commas and periods are in
the right place. In the case of a translated
book, a copyeditor should also be
knowledgeable about the source language.
But this was not the case at this particular
company, where the books were translated
by university students under the watchful
eye of a professor. So, I got some grammar
books and a dictionary and began to find
discrepancies in the translations, which I
brought to the attention of the editor-inchief. To no avail, however, since, for him,
the professor's word was good enough.
I don't really know what prompted me
to do so, but I went back to the University
of Amsterdam to study Swedish, and by
coincidence ended up in a class taught
by that same professor. I must admit that
we didn't have the best relationship. But a
few years later, I translated my first book
from Swedish into Dutch. I now have four
published translations to my name.

When did you come to America, and what
prompted you to make that move?
I came in 1983 when I was 35. It was
my now ex-wife who made me jump
the puddle.

Did you have family here or know people in
the U.S. language industry when you arrived?
No, except for my second wife's parents, I
had no family here. I had one friend who
lived in Manhattan. Otherwise, all I had
were a few letters of introduction from
the Dutch publishers who had been my
employers for many years.

Tell us about those early days here in
America. Were you translating at that time,
working, or both?
I soon discovered that American
publishers were not standing around
waiting for a "book freak who was fluent
in four languages" (as I was referred to
back in the Netherlands). I ended up
working for Doubleday Bookstore at their
flagship store on Fifth Avenue. I had a
few other book-related jobs before joining
E.J. Brill, a Dutch scholarly publishing
company. I had replied to their ad in
26

The ATA Chronicle | January/February 2017

Publisher's Weekly, and they hired me to
manage their American operation.

Please tell us how you started your own
book-selling company. Did you see a
niche in the specialized area of language
dictionaries and reference works for
translators and interpreters?
Brill had purchased a mail-order bookstore
and wanted to use it as their base for
entering the U.S. market. I was in charge
of promoting the publishing company and
running the bookstore. For the first three
years the bookstore was on the 10th floor
of an office building on Broadway. In 1988,
we moved to Kinderhook, New York, where
I ran the company out of a barn and later,
after the separation from Brill, out of my
basement. When the company was split up
in the early 1990s, I took over the bookstore
and stayed in Kinderhook while the
publishing branch moved to Boston. At that
time the bookstore carried a lot of language
material, including instructional books on
how to speak Zulu, a Zulu dictionary, and
books about less mainstream languages
like Lithuanian, Maori, and Urdu. I started
looking for material and built the stock up
to about 70 languages.

What I can do is provide a place where
publishers, authors, translators,
and interpreters can showcase their
products to the end user.

How did you first connect with ATA?
One day, I got a tip about exhibiting
at ATA's Annual Conference. I shipped
six boxes of books to Seattle in 1988,
sold almost all of them, and realized I
had found my niche and my calling. By
comparison, the last year I attended the
conference as InTrans Book Service, I
brought 44 boxes of books.

Please tell us about your 25 years of hosting
a booth at ATA's Annual Conferences.
After the success at my first conference,
I realized that there was a group of
professionals that needed professional
material and decided to focus on that

group. I began compiling a list of highly
specialized dictionaries and started
marketing my services to ATA's local
chapters and other organizations. In the
early years there where several booksellers
at ATA conferences-companies like
Adler's Foreign Books, Imported Books,
and the Continental Book Company.
The difference between them and i.b.d.,
Ltd (which later became InTrans Book
Service) was that I focused solely on
the translation/interpreting community,
whereas my competition offered a
much broader range of foreign-language
products, many of which were of little
interest to translators or interpreters.
In my 25-plus years in the business,
I was able to build up an incredible
rapport with this community. As a result,
InTrans became the place to buy books
and meet your friends at ATA conferences.
The conferences were also an awesome
opportunity for me to listen to translators
and interpreters, to learn their needs, and
then function as their personal worldwide
shopper. Before the Internet, my resources
were the various publishers' catalogues
and the three largest European trade
shows: the international Buchmesse in
Frankfurt, the Liber in Spain, and the
London Book Fair. It was always thrilling
to find new titles and introduce them
to my customers. While selling books
throughout the year, it seemed I was
always working toward the next ATA
conference. For me, that was the most
exciting event of the year.

How would you compare the translation/
interpreting "world" you found in the U.S.
when you arrived to what it is today? Can
you see trends that might provide some
insight into where we're going?
The U.S. had no foreign dictionary
publishing industry worth mentioning.
Almost every available title was published
in a country where English was not the
native language. Other than traveling and
bringing back a suitcase full of dictionaries,
or buying them here from a few, generally
overpriced brick-and-mortar stores, it was
difficult for translators to build up a library.
Today, thanks to the Internet, access has
become so much easier. In the early days I
used it like a virtual library, searching online
for new publications. Then publishing
www.atanet.org
http://www.atanet.org
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of The ATA Chronicle - January/February 2017
