Last year Robert Bally, Account Manager in The Translation People’s Birmingham office, completed twenty years of service. Here he looks back on the last twenty years and discusses how things have changed:

When I started in the translation industry twenty odd years ago, it was very different to today’s translation business. PCs had only just come onto the market, but hardly any translators had them, instead they would work on typewriters, some manual, some electronic. This meant that translators had to be very careful when typing, as any spelling mistakes would mean the whole page would have to be retyped.

Jobs would come in by post or by a wonderful new invention called the fax machine. These fax machines were not like the ones we use now, they had rolls of thermal paper and were supposed to cut the paper into A4 pages, but usually the cutting mechanism did not work and you would come into the office in the morning and find a roll of paper hanging out of the machine. You would then have to go through cutting up the pages.

You would have to manually count every job to do a quote, which was a real pain.

Turnaround times were a lot longer as you had to post out jobs to translators and they would then post them back. If you were lucky the odd one would have a fax machine.

If any typesetting was needed, the setters would take these texts and have to rekey it all into their setting systems; my colleague Peter Hansen’s article discusses this further.

The first PCs we used in the office were 286 computers which were fantastic for their time, but today’s PC users would not recognise them. They used a DOS system, there was no Microsoft, no modems just basic word processing, nice and simple.

Within a couple of years, all translators were using PCs, modems came in and they were able to send work electronically. Microsoft became the format to use.

Now we can do fantastic formatting, have translation tools like Trados and everything is sent by the click of a mouse. We have come a very long way in the last twenty years!