Brian Kelly

This testimony begins in the ‘Minicomputer systems and software 1969-82’ archive. Click here to view.

Apple Computer launched the Macintosh in January 1984, just seven months after I had set up its Irish sales office in Mount Street Crescent, Dublin. The new system was hailed as a major leap forward in user friendliness but, even though it was positioned as a business computer, the Mac lacked business applications. It came of age with desktop publishing after Aldus Corporation introduced PageMaker in July 1985.

Apple’s European headquarters in Paris was constantly talking to American software companies about the need for Macintosh applications. Most had no idea what was involved in taking their products to Europe. This led me to consider the possibility of setting up a software and documentation localisation service based in Ireland. It would not only translate their interface, help files and manuals but would also provide software re-engineering and testing services. I resigned from Apple in November 1984 and set up Softrans International. Michael Gavin, who had worked with me at Data General, joined as a senior partner and sales director.

Brian at Apple in 1984 with the original model of the Macintosh computer.
(Photograph courtesy of Brian Kelly)

We were the first to offer localisation services for Mac software. Myself and Michael went to California in early 1985. Apple set up meetings with developers for us and we came back with a lot of products. We soon discovered that many of these would be hard to adapt because they depended on US telecommunications standards.

Softrans qualified for an enterprise development program that the IDA had launched. This included a £50,000 grant, but we needed to raise matching funds from an investor. We toured many banks and investment institutes during 1985 and eventually obtained the required amount from two sources – 3i and a Dublin-based company that manufactured plates for the printing industry.

Luckily, we had started with some personal investment capital which allowed us take on key personnel, including Charlie Hughes from Online Computing as head of software and Irene O’Hare as linguistic manager. She had studied languages in Salamanca before working for Data General in Belfast and then with me at the Apple office in Dublin.

Pricing by the word was the standard practice for translation services. At the beginning, therefore, we set a fixed charge for each word or page that we translated. We did not bill the customers for engineering services or project management, even though none of that work could be repeated from one job to the next. It was not the most appropriate model for localisation !

Living Videotext in California was our first customer. We produced European versions of its Think Tank outlining software for the IBM PC as well as for the Macintosh. Then we did a very big job – based on the size of the manual – for database company Microrim in Seattle.

Business was sporadic but we developed longer term contracts with Apple, Oracle, Commodore, Wang and others. Hardware vendors were less resistant to localisation services than software developers, probably because their products contained fewer lines of code. We got work from AST Research, which in those days made multi-function expansion cards for the IBM PC, from 3Com for its early communication boards and from printer manufacturer Dataproducts.

One interesting customer that Michael found in California was Berkeley Softworks whose GEOS operating software offered a Macintosh-like GUI for the Commodore 64. To produce this, we had to process the localisation of each character on the screen pixel by pixel. The work was tedious and frustrating, but we completed it successfully.

As the projects came in, an internal infrastructure developed at the Softrans office in Blackrock. In the early days the artwork for manuals had to be cut with scalpels and pasted with gum. Later on we installed two linotype film processors, each costing some £35,000, which supported computer output.

We needed engineers to do work that was regarded as boring in comparison to application development. But Ireland was then producing a fair number of graduates and their job opportunities in development were limited. Two of our best ever engineering recruits were working in McDonalds while seeking jobs. We also employed diploma graduates straight out of the Institutes of Technology.

There was a lot of interaction between Charlie’s department and the application developers, because so much of the user interface text in PC software was embedded in the code. Resizing windows to accommodate changes of text was a recurring issue on Microsoft PCs.

The main language requirements for our customers were French, Italian, German and Spanish – known collectively as FIGS. We could use contractors to translate user documentation, but we also needed to have a quorum for each language in-house. We totally underestimated the challenge in hiring qualified translators. We hired a ski instructor as our first French translator and then took on a couple of good Spanish translators. Reinhard Schäler came in as our first German translator. Wojtek Kosinski, who had studied in Maynooth, joined as a software engineer and went on to build our project tracking systems and our first online translation portal.

Irene O’Hare also built up relationships with third level colleges in places such as Clermont Ferrand and Madrid. These sent us graduates who furthered their careers by working in Ireland for a couple of years.

Softrans International was ahead of its time. We lived on next to nothing as we trained engineers and invested in getting a new industry going. Other companies reaped the benefits. When Lotus and Microsoft started localisation work they both began to recruit our people. By the end of the 1980s, a large proportion of Europe’s localisation specialists were located in Dublin. Ireland’s contribution to the industry peaked in the 1990s.

INK, based in the Netherlands and founded by Jaap van der Meer, was another of the original localisation service providers. In 1990 INK held a forum for representatives from its client companies to discuss industry trends and challenges. That forum later invited other service providers, including Softrans and Mendez, to participate. The attendees decided to organise a more formal, wider association with membership from both publishers and providers and the Localisation Industry Standards Association (LISA) was born.

LISA was where the service providers could hear what the publishers wanted and they could listen to our problems. I was one of the members of the initial board. Later on, however, LISA became more like a cattle market that people used only to sell their services.

In 1989 Printech invested £300,000 for a 42.5 per cent stake in Softrans, but the tie-in did not bring in extra work. The people in software publishing companies who bought printing services worked separately from the people who chose translators.

We soon realised that we would need another partnership so that the company could grow beyond its own limited resources. Berlitz International, a long-established global player in the language education market, was seeking to expand its translation business and showed an interest in our technical capabilities. In December 1991 Berlitz acquired a majority 51 per cent shareholding in Softrans. Newspaper publisher Robert Maxwell was the majority owner of Berlitz when the heads of agreement for this deal were completed in October. In the following month Maxwell drowned after falling from his yacht off the Canary Islands and the transaction was delayed by negotiations over his debts. We started working with Berlitz regardless under an American executive Mike Mulligan.

The company operated as Softrans Berlitz for a short period before being fully integrated into the Berlitz organisation. This gave us access to a worldwide network of offices, significant additional sales resources – especially in the USA – and capital to invest in production facilities. I ran the translation business in Europe and tried to help our American colleagues to understand localisation.

Japanese publisher Fukutake took control of Berlitz in 1992 and supported the expansion of the translation business. We acquired companies in Poland, which became our technical centre, in France and in Germany, which gave us contacts with the automotive industry. The company’s internal reporting system was very good. Berlitz managers received full profit and loss accounts from across the organisation within five days of the end of each quarter and we could respond quickly to issues that we saw in these reports.

The Berlitz premises in Georges Place, Dun Laoghaire, pictured in 2001.
(Photograph courtesy of Brian Kelly)

In 1991 Softrans had 70 employees and annual revenues of £9 million. By 1995 Berlitz had localisation sales worth more than £30 million and we employed 500 people, including 300 engineers at two offices in Dun Laoghaire and one in Blackrock. Some Softrans staff worked on-site in Microsoft. It had now become much easier for us to recruit multi-lingual people with hybrid skills. We taught them how to interact with customers.

Microsoft’s Windows 95 was a landmark for the translation services industry. Its integrated localisation features enabled applications software vendors to release products simultaneously in different languages and they expanded beyond the four FIGS languages. The localisation industry was also starting to standardise its tools and methods.

Softrans had started to develop an in-house glossary management tool before it became part of Berlitz. This assisted translators in locating and using consistently approved terms. It initially ran on Apple Macs and later PCs. The Trados Translators Workbench brought computer aided translation to a wider market in the mid-1990s. Publishers such as Microsoft, Oracle and Novell not only adopted it, but also required that all their vendors use the toolset on localisation projects. From then on the translation process became more and more commoditised.

In the early 1990s France Telecom approached us to discuss the potential for translation services over its Minitel service. This never came to life, but it alerted us to the idea of online translation.

The advent of online software distribution in my opinion had a very positive impact on localisation, as major titles moved from annual or bi-annual releases to a more constant upgrade model. But its impact on the printing and fulfilment industry in Ireland was negative.

By the turn of the century some of our biggest customers were software groups at mobile phone and camera makers. Nokia, indeed, required versions of many products in 75 languages. Our largest project, however, came from Microsoft. We translated 19 million words into seven languages when it introduced the .Net platform.

In 2002 the Berlitz translation business had annual revenues of about $120 million, including $70 million in Europe. Fukutake, however, decided to focus the Berlitz organisation on language education and to divest its localisation and publishing operations.

The management team in Dublin joined forces with Candover Investments and put forward a bid of $75 million. Our offer was accepted. During a re-negotiation of the price, however, Bowne Global Solutions saw an opportunity to re-enter the contest. Bowne, whose parent company specialised in documentation for corporate finance, eventually sealed a deal.

Jim Fagan, who was based in the US, became CEO of the combined operation. I stayed on as chief operating officer for Europe. Larry Wade, who had worked at Bowne’s office in Dublin, was appointed COO for the US. After the merger we had too lose 350 people from an amalgamated workforce of about 1,700. Larry and I handled this process together, breaking the bad news face-to-face to our staff.

I never saw real financial gain from mergers like these. None of the localisation service providers ever achieved sole vendor status with the big publishers. The cost to the customer never changed. The process was still driven by people and complicated by the way that people keep using different words to say the same thing. There was always too much text to translate and no one could afford to do everything.

Bowne quit the localisation business in 2005 and sold its operations to Lionbridge. Larry Wade died shortly afterwards. He drowned in a whirlpool on a hiking trip in the Rockies.

I left Lionbridge in 2006. With hindsight I think that the localisation service providers stayed too close to the software industry for too long. Berlitz, then Bowne, should have pushed harder to diversify. Translation work for financial services, life sciences and patent lawyers was always more profitable.

Last edit: February 2018

© Brian Kelly 2018