Jaap van der Meer: Translation Industry Pioneer

“The first revolution in this business was the explosion of the localization market in the early 1980s,” says Jaap van der Meer, surveying the short but very tumultuous history of the translation business, which he has had a hand in partly shaping. “The second revolution,” he continues, “is rise of the Internet, the growth of what we call ‘pervasive networks.’” Van der Meer sees the arrival of ’teletranslation’, translation being done remotely in a decentralized fashion, as the second great wave of innovation sweeping this industry.

Van der Meer was speaking in the Amsterdam office of ALPNET, the well-known translation and localization network company with financial headquarters in Salt Lake City, Utah. ALPNET was originally established in the 1970s as a developer of translation support software, but shifted its attention to services ten years ago.

Two years ago, Van der Meer joined ALPNET as vice president marketing and sales, and he was recently appointed president of the company, succeeding the departing Tom Seal. As one of the pioneers of the localization business, Van der Meer’s personal history sheds a welcome light on that of the industry as a whole.

The translation business to which Jaap van der Meer arrived in the early 1980s, fresh from university and a brief stint as a translator at the Amsterdam office of Associated Press, was essentially a cottage industry, vast and hidden, firmly resilient to consolation and mechanization, two of the well-nigh inexorable features of the modern capitalist age. Perceiving a market for professional translation services, Van der Meer, together with his colleague Simon Andriessen, established the translation company INK in Amsterdam in 1980.

The seed that appeared on INK’s doorstep in 1982, subsequently blossoming into the enormous localization business, was the documentation for IBM’s DisplayWrite System. “A very substantial volume of documentation needed to be translated within three months,” recalls Van der Meer. “It entailed a level of organization and management which hadn’t been seen before in the translation business.” Technical documentation has been around a lot longer than 1982, but the volatile PC industry burst forth with a volume and demand for quick turnaround which had never been seen before.

Under the stewardship of Van der Meer and Andriessen, INK evolved into one of the first “modern” translation companies. It was an early-adapter in wordprocessing technology. It couldn’t find suitable translators so it trained its own. To handle large jobs quickly and efficiently, it established hierarchical teams of translators and editors. Joining forces with other translation companies, INK pioneered the concept of a translation network, a cross-border coupling of translation forces to handle big, multi-language projects.

Having experimented with early versions of the ALPNET Translation Support Software (TSS) package and finding it wanting, INK embarked upon its own software development program, which resulted in the INK TextTools. To promote awareness of the industry as a whole, INK launched the magazine (later renamed ), one of the very first publications to be produced using the then brand new DTP techniques.

While never great commercial successes, both INK TextTools and Language Technology established INK as a influential presence in the translation business. When INK stopped further development of the TextTools, INK’s German partner picked up the ball and commenced development of what is now one of the most widely used translation support packages, Trados.

Likewise, Language Technology, which subsequently went on to achieve fame and notoriety as Electric Word, formed a fertile petrie dish numerous writers and graphic designers, and in turn served as the springboard for its editor for the launch of the popular American technoculture fanzine several years later.

As the PC software industry expanded and matured in the late 1980s and went through the inevitable consolidations, INK found itself beleaguered by smaller, leaner competitors undercutting it pricewise in specific language-pairs on the one hand, and, on the other, the tendency for the software publishers to shop around from job to job, making it difficult for large, well-established companies like INK to maintain the requisite infrastructure.

”Software publishers talked for years about partnership, but at the same time they went shopping for every project. Maybe they had no choice, because most of the translation service suppliers were indeed too small and or were not honest in presenting their capabilities. This situation severely hampered the evolution of the translation business.” He believes, however, that the climate has been slowly improving: “We are starting to see software publishers take a long-term view and stay with us for subsequent releases of a product.”

INK was acquired in 1994 by US printing giant RR Donnelley, as a complement to the latter’s extensive software manufacturing business, and became known as Donnelley Language Services (DLS). Donnelley’s foray into the translation business was met with mixed success. Its localization business (including DLS) has since been bought out by Rory Cowan and renamed it Lionbridge.