The ATA Chronicle - January/February 2017 - 27


went digital, making it easier to format
dictionaries so they could be accessed via
the web. Experts in certain fields began to
publish their own digital glossaries, and it
wasn't long before printed dictionaries were
moved from shelves to the basement. I think
my first website was up in 2004, and it was
phenomenal to be able to find titles on other
sites, allowing us to offer our customers a
wide variety of products.
But once specialized wordlists, and then
dictionaries, appeared online, printed
dictionaries were no longer in demand
among beginning translators. Pre-World
Wide Web translators held on to theirs,
but cautiously began to use the everexpanding supply of reference material
now available with just a keystroke. The
number of new dictionaries in print
today has dwindled. Strangely enough,
dictionaries on CD were never a great
success, and most of them were supplied
with the purchase of the printed book.
Once typesetting went digital, it was only
one short step to put all that content
on the web. And with that, the era of
translation memory began, making
translating much more efficient. More
and more machine translation software is
available, and Google and Microsoft are
now players in the translation market.
These are trends I can see, but I have
no insight as to where this is going. I
don't know if the book, or in this case
the dictionary, will still play a role as time
goes by. I doubt it. Translation must be
done quickly and, above all, cheaply, so
translators no longer have the time to flip
through a dictionary as we used to do.

and there was a demand for highly
specialized dictionaries/glossaries,
often put together by translators.
InTrans Book Service was, of course,
an excellent channel through which to
market these titles. When the dictionary
business started to collapse, I focused
on related material, like translation
studies and specialized textbooks.
Dictionary sales, with the exception of
those for which I had a sort of exclusive
representation, also went downhill
because of competition from online
booksellers like Amazon and Barnes
& Noble.

What fields or subjects were your
customers mainly interested in when
you first started your business? Did that
change much over the years?

What is the next step in that process?

They wanted specialized dictionaries-
technical, medical, and legal, mostly in
German, French, Spanish, Portuguese,
and Italian. Some wanted Dutch and
Scandinavian dictionaries. Those
languages were easy to procure.
There were some highly specialized
multilingual dictionaries published in
Moscow that were very popular. (The
publisher Elsevier had a whole series
of them produced for the Western
hemisphere.) Later, things changed
www.atanet.org

You've lived and worked during what will
be remembered as the watershed period
between the past and the future of the book
industry. You grew up in a business that has
been dramatically altered by the modern
phenomenon of the Internet. What are your
thoughts on that transition?
The Internet has given us tremendous
access to more stuff than we can handle.
If I was a translator nowadays, I know I
would use it. The problem, I believe, as
regards educational material, is that you
can find a lot if you know what you're
looking for, but if you don't know what
is available, there is no way you can
buy it. That was one of the benefits of
being at the ATA conferences, where I
could introduce my customers to new
products, which Amazon can't do. Yes,
you can buy anything online, but,
again, you have to know what you're
looking for.
This year, at the conferences of the
National Association of Judiciary
Interpreters and Translators, California
Federation of Interpreters, and ATA,
I took a new approach. It's no longer
possible for me to stock books that I
can't sell because I can't compete with
online stores. What I can do is provide
a place where publishers, authors,
translators, and interpreters can
showcase their products to the end user.
Maybe by doing this I can keep some
of the tradition alive and make sure that
customers leave a conference
better informed.

At what point did you realize that giant
online booksellers would displace
operations like yours?
When customers started saying:
"Oh, Freek, you charge $125 for this
book, but I can get it at Amazon for
$95. Can you match that price?"

What are you reading these days? Do you
own a Kindle or similar device?
I have an iPad on which I do not read
books, and I have no other electronic
reading device. Right now I'm reading
Everybody's Fool by Richard Russo, and
I just finished My Father's Paradise by
Ariel Sabar, the author's search for his
family's past that takes him from Iraq
to Israel to the United States. My
problem is that I buy more books than
I can read. I just got The Noise of Time
by Julian Barnes and A Little Life
by Hanya Yanagihara. Oh, and don't
let me forget the beautiful books by
Haruki Murakami, translated by Jay
Rubin, a guest speaker at the 2016
ATA conference.

Will our grandchildren still be
reading books as we do today? How about
their grandchildren?
I believe so, but it will depend on the
parents and grandparents. Will they
encourage a tradition of reading to their
kids or will they leave them to their own
devices, literally and figuratively?

Now that you've retired, what do you miss
most about the book business?
I miss the research, trying to stay on top
of the game and surprise my customers by
having material I know they will need to
become better translators and interpreters.
I miss the excitement of the opening of
the exhibits. I miss the personal contact
and my friends. Maybe that will change
now with my new approach. What an
amazing world. 
Tony Beckwith was born in
Buenos Aires, Argentina, spent
his formative years in Montevideo,
Uruguay, then set off to see the
world. He moved to Texas in 1980
and currently lives in Austin,
Texas, where he works as a writer, translator, poet, and
cartoonist. Contact: tony@tonybeckwith.com.
American Translators Association

27
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of The ATA Chronicle - January/February 2017
