Prakash Chitale as Translator

 

After finishing my extensive education in Pune, Heidelberg
and Saragossa

Universities, and having a small stint as Asst. Librarian
and Marathi Teacher

in the South Asia Institute in Heidelberg, I joined the German

Pharmaceutical and
Fine Chemicals company E. Merck in April 1972 as the

Head of Translation
Department in Mumbai.   The translation
and interpretation

activity involved
subjects like the extensive drug trial reports of the company,

pharmaceutical and
chemical texts, further civil, electrical and mechanical

engineering texts,
business correspondence and reports from and into German

and various other
matters.   I stayed with E. Merck till
May 1976.

 

After a short stint as Executive Asst. to Chairman of
Hawkins in 1976-77, I

joined the Goethe Institute Mumbai as honorary teacher and
launched my

career as a Free-lance Translator and Interpreter for German
and Spanish

in 1978, working for the German and Spanish Consulates in
Mumbai, and

for the Indo-German Chamber of Commerce, Mumbai as a panel
translator.

This association with the Chamber has survived over four
decades. The

teaching activity with Max Mueller Bhavan, Mumbai lasted
from 1977 to 1987.

 

In these four decades I must have worked for more than 300

different  German and
Germany-related companies, the most illustrious of

these have been Siemens, BASF, Bayer, Uhde, Larsen &
Toubro, Grauer & Weil,

SAP, Cable Corporation, several Tata companies.  As interpreter I offered services

to German diplomats and politicians, to the diamond
industry,  the International

Wool Secretariat and woolen cloth manufacturers like Dinesh,
Digjam, OCM and

Raymonds, to several manufacturing and exporting houses and
to almost

everyone who needed help in understanding the Germans.  In 1982 I

together with Barbara Malchow Tayebi, Head of the Language
Dept. in

Goethe Institute Mumbai, designed the first Technical
Translation courses

in Mumbai which I taught with distinction till 1987.   In 1982 I trained

top submariners of the Indian Navy who went to Kiel, Germany
to assist

and supervise the construction of the submarines for the
Indian Navy. 

My very special services were honored by the Indian Navy at
the end of

the training program by decorating me with the Naval Crest,
a rare honor

for a civilian.

 

My knowledge of the German language and some management
experience

led to two extremely interesting and exciting assignments at
two extreme

ends of Germany, one in Emden on the Dutch border, where I
was the

Project Coordinator for the largest ever translocation of an
industrial plant

from Emden on the North Sea to Hazira, India on the Arabian
Sea.  I was

the ‘man in the middle’ of this mammoth project lasting over
27 months;

the second project was in the extreme East, in Chemnitz
almost on the

Czech border during the Treuhand- guided privatization of
the East German

Conglomerate Germania. In 1993-94 I was the language
specialist for the

Translation of the background material of SAP’s software for
utility cos.

along with 4 software engineers of SISL. The job was
executed at the SAP

Headquarters in Walldorf/Germany.