Company History
How it all began....
|
|
WYHLIDAL has been synonymous with technical dictionaries for more than 35 years. Many people
keep asking the same question: How does one
come up with the idea
of writing dictionaries? What prompted you to found a publishing
company? After all, it is not exactly an everyday thing to create a dictionary
specifically for the automotive industry.
As it often
happens in life, it all began with a deficit: In this case, a lack of technical dictionaries. And then there was Ferdinand
Leopold Johann Wyhlidal, working
at the time as an engineer for Daimler-Benz in Stuttgart, who
happened to be in charge of processing American safety regulations.
|
In his search for
dictionaries, he soon found that there
were none for his area
of specialization. Even among his colleagues,
the knowledge of automotive English was quite limited. As a result, he organized English classes with great dedication
and in cooperation with a Stuttgart-based language school. In July of 1972, the
first book appeared, approx. 30 pages in length and put together
on a typewriter: “Special terminology
for automotive engineering: German-English”. The author
was Mr. Wyhlidal. This first publication was quickly out of print due to great
demand among colleagues – it was accepted with such enthusiasm that the 2nd edition, which was twice as thick, appeared
a year later. There were, of
course, German-English dictionaries,
but these were intended for general
language purposes. As far as technical
terms went, these dictionaries were quite inadequate,
which, by the way, still holds true today.
The idea to found
a publishing company and author a dictionary
for automotive engineering was born. As it turned out, this was an idea with a future.
The first German-English/English-German dictionary
was published as a 529-page
paperback in April, 1974. Along
with the supplement, which appeared in 1976, the two dictionaries for many years
served as the standard reference
work for the automotive industry and its
suppliers.
In order to meet demand,
Mr. Wyhlidal also wrote dictionaries in the
German-French/French-German and
English-French/French-English language pairs. A dictionary of abbreviations and acronyms rounded
off the automotive engineering product range.
Revised editions of the
classic WYHLIDAL
German-English/English-German – always expanded by special
fields – have been coming out at intervals of
two to three
years since 1991. As early as in 1993, the WYHLIDAL could be purchased in a database version for PCs and PC networks. In 1994, the printed and database
versions were still offered in parallel, but in 1997 a CD-ROM edition was given preference to the
production of a new print edition.
In an anticipatory move, WYHLIDAL
expanded the dictionary to also include terms from
fields other than automotive engineering: Since the language used
in the automotive field does not only consist of
special terms, numerous general language expressions were added.
Supplemented by a significantly increased number of key words
from the areas of company
organization, sales and distribution, marketing, purchasing, law and legislation,
the WYHLIDAL is now a standard reference work for the industry
that has also become suitable for general use.
As its entries, the
WYHLIDAL
also reflects progressive developments
in its user profile: In another logical step, WYHLIDAL
appeared in an Intranet version.
Today, the WYHLIDAL is also available as an ASP application on the world wide web.