That person is Freek Lankhof, President of InTrans Book Service – a true friend of our
profession. Those who do not know Freek (one
measure of his friendship is that he lets us pronounce his name “Freak” instead
of “Frake”) may think at first that he is just an exhibitor in interpreting and
translation conferences and educational activities throughout the United
States. Well, he is an exhibitor, but not just that. Freek is passionate about our profession –being
himself a translator. Born in the Netherlands,
Freek studied Swedish and worked as a Swedish–Dutch translator. He also worked for a Dutch publishing company
and then became a proofreader and copy editor. The book distribution business brought him to
the United States, but he quickly decided to start his own company focused on reference and teaching materials in English –Spanish translation and
interpretation, although he
also stocks a variety of resources in other languages.
If you organize an
activity with enough participants to make it worth his while to attend (hey… the
guy has to make a living), he will be there.
At times, he will load up his car with hundreds of heavy books and drive
miles to allow us to buy resources right at the event. Other times, he will fly to the event,
shipping his books ahead of time. The wonderful thing about all this is that
Freek is always there with his friendly smile and gentle manners. Even more
wonderful is that he will not stop coming to our events even if some of his books
have been stolen; sad to say. Freek and
his services have become a feature of most educational events in our field. Exhibitors come and go, but Freek is always
there. He is part of our profession.
Giants like Amazon.com,
however, are an imminent threat to his business. While Freek runs his business not only to
earn a living but because he loves what he does, he cannot offer the discounts
that the giants of the book distribution business can. I would urge my fellow translators and
interpreters to never use our friend’s list of books and prices as a source of
information and then buy those books somewhere else. The research work that Freek does to provide
our profession with the latest publications is more than worth any small
additional price for his books and reference materials. This is what I love
about Freek and wanted to share with you.
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