William Pratt

The path that led William to Leinhäuser Language Services winds back to Raleigh, the capital of North Carolina in the United States. The year was 1982, and William had been part of the copy editing crew at the News & Observer newspaper for four years. It was a time when he began to think about the big world. And he did think big. He decided to learn German and set his sights on The Stars and Stripes, a daily newspaper based in West Germany for the huge U.S. military community in Europe.

A journey that began with…der, die and das….”

The plan turned into a five-year marathon that began with a German course at North Carolina State University. The journey took its first detour shortly thereafter. He accepted a position at The State newspaper in Columbia, South Carolina, in 1982 and then resumed his German studies at the University of South Carolina, where he’d earned a journalism degree in 1976. These studies led to an exchange program at the University of Bamberg, Germany, in 1985 and 1986. Back in Columbia, he knew that Germany was the place to be and he inundated the managing editor of Stripes with letters. The full-court press worked, and he was hired in 1988.

Eleven years later, he joined the short-lived English version of The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ). William then worked at a Cologne-based translation company before joining the FAZ-Institut as an editor/translator. After his department was closed in 2014, he struck gold and joined Leinhäuser the next year. Since then, he has served as a jack-of-all-trades translator. As a release, he devotes himself to creating the perfect pizza dough, a pursuit he began after contracting COVID-19 in 2021. Unfortunately, his colleagues in Bavaria never get to sample the “treats” of the Darmstadt-based baker.