Earl Coleman, 93; founded translation firm
NEW YORK - Earl M. Coleman was a fledgling short-story writer and poet fresh out of the Army when he got the idea for a custom translation business in 1946. At a poetry workshop he organized, he got to talking with two students, one a French teacher, the other a German engineer.
Why not translate scientific material into English? Mr. Coleman suggested.
With his wife at the time, Frances, he started Consultants Bureau, a custom translation service, and over the years built it into Plenum Publishing Corp., one of the world’s largest translators and publishers of scientific and technical material. Through Da Capo Press, founded in 1963, it developed a profitable line in reprinted books on music, art, and architecture.
Mr. Coleman died of a pulmonary embolism on Oct. 12 at the age of 93, said his wife, Ellen Schneid Coleman. He lived in Somerset, N.J.
Mr. Coleman had started with a hundred dollars and a flash of intuition. Soon after setting up Consultants Bureau, he learned that the US government was sitting on 21 tons of captured German scientific documents. He immediately offered to buy a ton of them, only to be told that the government did not work that way.
Instead, the Commerce Department sent out to American businesses a monthly bulletin describing selected documents in the German cache. Those interested could order a document and then translate it.
Mr. Coleman saw that companies were translating the same articles over and over - a pointless duplication of effort. “Obviously the problem was how to mass-produce translations of scientific material,’’ he told Publishers Weekly in 1975.
He then turned to the Soviet Union as a source of material. Other companies were already translating articles from Soviet scientific journals, but Mr. Coleman decided to publish journals in their entirety, starting in 1949 with The Journal of General Chemistry, USSR.
By 1956, his company was translating a dozen Soviet journals, using a stable of 50 translators.
He signed a royalty agreement with the Soviet government’s copyright agency, the first such large-scale agreement between a Western company and the Soviet Union and the foundation of his success.
There was a bit of poetry in his renaming of the company in 1965. He called it Plenum “for full, rich, plentiful,’’ Mr. Coleman told Publishers Weekly. “It was either that or Nova, which I discovered was a bright star that burned out, so that wasn’t for me.’’