Welcome to the Textwerkstatt!

This is the web presence of Ralf Steck, freelance technical journalist in the fields of CAD / CAM, engineering and IT. It is mostly written in German, but with this English language page I want to give not-german-speaking prospective clients and and other interested persons a summary of the information on the German pages.

In the right sidebar you can find an automatic translator into many languages, just klick the corresponding flag. As always with services that depend on Google Translations, the results are a bit clumsy, my apologizes for this.

Die Textwerkstatt

The translation of my company theme corresponds to “The Text Shop” with “shop” as in “machine shop” The term is intended to transport the philosophy I have in my daily work: to generate precise, high-quality articles, using my technical background as a mechanical engineer and the over 15 years of experience in journalism.

Background

I always was a techie – starting with disassembling my fathers wrist watch at the age of four. He swears I reassembled it, ending up with two parts left over and the watch still working. Since then I work on everything I can get hold of, especially vintage cars and computers.

Born in 1964, I grew up in Ulm, a small town in southern Germany. In scool, I had, amongst others , courses in English (8 years), Latin (4 years), and French (2 years), a good basis for my language skills. I studied mechanical engineering in Karlsruhe and got my diploma in 1993. I stared right away in journalism in the Dressler Verlag, a publishing house in Heidelberg, where I worked until I started my own business in 1996.

Since the I work for a wide variety of customers in the areas CAD/CAM and Engineering. I am editor-in-chief of two publications of the Hanser Verlag, CAD CAM and MONTAGEtechnik. I wrote for well-known publications such as Financial Times Deutschland or c’t.

More information on my (english) LinkedIn profile here

Apart from writing in German I always created translations – of my own articles, of press releases, customers’ stories, technical data sheets, whitepapers or even packages of Corel Draw or IBM ViaVoice. So I have quite some experience in technical english, whilst not being a professional translator.

I live in Friedrichshafen, next to the Lake Constance, a beautiful landscape next to the Swiss and Austrian border.

If you are interested, please call me on +49 7541 24234 or send a mail – of course English or German – to rsteck@die-textwerkstatt.de. I look forward to our conversation.

I wish you to enjoy reading – and to myself a lot of fun writing

Ralf Steck