Welcome to Die Textwerkstatt!

This is the web presence of Ralf Steck, freelance technical journalist in digital product development. My websiteis mostly 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.

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 20 years of experience in technical and special interest 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 school, I had, amongst others :-), courses in English (8 years), Latin (4 years), and French (2 years), a good base for my language skills. I studied mechanical engineering in Karlsruhe and got my diploma in 1993. Then I started 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 then I work for a wide variety of customers in the areas CAD/CAM and Engineering. I was editor-in-chief of magazines such as CAD CAM (2006-2010, :K CAD CAM from 2010 to 2014)) and MONTAGEtechnik (2009-2011) And I wrote for well-known publications such as Financial Times Deutschland or c’t.

I wrote a book named CAD for Makers, work as moderator at events and had speeches at forums and trade shows.

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 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