TAUS - Enabling better translation

We are sad to have lost a translation industry ‘founding father’ – Geoffrey Kingscott – who died on Wednesday March 2, 2011.

Below are some personal memories of colleagues who so much enjoyed working with him over the years.

Simon Andriesen & Jaap van der Meer, co-founders of INK

Geoffrey Kingscott was an example and an inspiration for us in the early eighties when we just started building up our translation business. In a way he was our conscience. He published the Language Monthly (later Language International) magazine long before Multilingual Magazine existed. He ran his own translation business. He was an authority, a keynote speaker at many conferences. We loved to hear him speaking, for the British accent, the humor, and his incredible knowledge. The industry truly lost a ‘founding father’ in Geoffrey Kingscott.

Andrew Joscelyne, language industry consultant

I first met Geoff when he was editor (as well as founder and chief writer) of Language Monthly, as far as I know the first attempt to put non-academic language/business issues -  especially translation - into  newsworthy media content, built around  events and personalities. He used to come to Paris each year, hire a stand at Expolangues - a language trade show in the heady days of the late 1980s when Europe was beginning to throw money at its language question - and try and whip up interest in his magazine (he published articles in French and German in those days before the global English generation). The 'language industry' was on the rise and rise at this time, and Geoff with his practical, intuitive intelligence grasped the importance of the impact of technology, while holding on to his personal, local take on the world of translation. He understood before most of us the need to communicate, to embrace the media, to be a message guy. Yet he was always suspicious of big money, political maneuvers, and technocratic control of the world of translation. He once told me he would have loved to write a book about the mystery of language, the fact that you can 'say' X in one language but have to paraphrase it, go round the houses to say the same thing in another. He was a good writer but alas it was one dream he never fulfilled.

Jan Freijser, INK

It has been many years since I last met Geoffrey, but I remember him best as the driving force behind the ASLIB Translating and the Computer Conference, in the years that we frequented it in the 1980s. This event was always a high point in the year, when we met up with representatives of the language business and industries from all over the world.

He impressed me by his dry wit, common sense, deep insight into translation issues, but also his vision of the bigger picture, the preservation of local languages, and his perception of the role of language as cultural identity bearer.

Rose Lockwood, Industry consultant

Geoffrey is most memorable to me for his combined interests in things European (degree in French, a pioneer in the translation industry) and a total commitment to his locality in the English Midlands. He was (along with his wife) a keen local historian and wrote books on "the shires" as well as on that notable British obsession, the local railways. He had a dry sense of humour (and a distinct regional accent) and enjoyed telling how he once overheard someone advising not to study English at Nottingham University, lest they "end up sounding like Geoff Kingscott". Modest self-confidence was his hallmark. Geoffrey was active politically, and while he was ambivalent about the politics of the "European Project" (and eventually supported the UK Independence Party after a lifetime as a Labour man), he was deeply committed to the European cultural project. He wrote position papers that helped formulate the European Translation Platform in the 1990s, an early attempt to bring the European translation industry under a single umbrella and to promote "multilingual Europe". He edited several important journals (Language Monthly, Language International, Language Today) and published George Weber's influential article on "geolinguistics" in 1995, one of the first attempts to rank languages by their importance for business and the translation industry. He made significant contributions to our understanding of translation quality and evaluation, not least through his articles for LISA. He was a pioneer in technical translation, developing one of the first formal multilingual terminologies for the automotive industry; working with the Society of Automotive Engineers he created the TOPTEC conference series dedicated to automotive translation. Perhaps most significantly for the TAUS community, Geoffrey was an early technology advocate at Praetorius, the translation agency he ran for 20 years, and spread the word about the possibilities for translation technology/MT from its beginnings in the 1980s.

TAUS and friends welcome comments, memories and thoughts to this site from everyone who knew Geoff Kingscott and appreciated his wide-ranging contribution to the translation industry.