Dieter Waeltermann

  • Part-time faculty

Education & Training

  • PhD, German Studies (Second Language Acquisition, Psycholinguistics, Translation Studies), The University of Texas at Austin, 1991
  • BA, German & Linguistics, The University of Texas at El Paso, 1985
  • Unterrichtsdolmetscher (MA equivalent), Sprachenschule der Bundeswehr, 1977

Representative Publications

Hadjinicolaou, Nikos. “Art centers and peripheral art.” Translation of: Hadjinicolaou, Nikos. “Kunstzentren und periphere Kunst.” In: Kritische Berichte. Zeitschrift für Kunst- und Kulturwissenschaften. 1983. Bd. 11 Nr. 4, p. 36-56. Translation published in: ARTMargins (MIT Press Journals), vol. 9, no. 2 (July, 2020), 119-140.

Borio, Gianmario. “Sound as Process. The Composers of Nuova Consonanza.” Translation of: Gianmario Borio. “Klang als Prozeß. Die Komponisten um Nuova Consonanza.” In: Music as Dream: Essays on Giacinto Scelsi. Franco Sciannameo and Alessandra Carlotta Pellegrini, eds. Lanham, Maryland: The Scarecrow Press, 2013.

“Conversations of German Immigrants.”  Translation of: Aref, Mohammed; Jefferson S. Chase; Zoran Drvenkar; Richard Duraj; Catalin Dorian Florescu; Radek Knapp; Nicol Ljubic; Selim Özdogan; Tzveta Sofronieva; Natascha Wodin – “Unterhaltungen deutscher Eingewanderten.”  Dimension² (1+2/2007): 3-15.

“Translation Quality in the Protective Coatings Industry.” Proceedings of the 40th Annual Conference of the American Translators Association, ed. Ann G. Macfarlane. Alexandria, VA: American Translators Association, 1999. 59-60.

“Teaching scientific-technical translation: the Carnegie Mellon experience.”  In: Vistas.  Peter W. Krawutschke, ed.  Medford, NJ: Learned Information, 1994.  409-420.

“Effects of discrete vocabulary knowledge on reading comprehension of authentic texts: quantitative vs. qualitative analysis.”  Schatzkammer 2 (1993): 23-32.

“The functions and activities of the Lebensborn-Organization within the SS, the Nazi regime, and Nazi ideology.”  The Honors Journal II (1985): 5-23.

Research Interests

As the owner of a translation agency specializing in scientific-technical translations, Dieter’s primary research interests are semantics and grammaticalization in various technical fields (the role of context sensitivity and context dependency in meaning), as well as terminology management and various software tools in supporting terminology management.

As a trained translator for major players in industry in German-speaking countries as well as Canada and the United States, Dieter lives and breathes several cultures and languages on a daily basis and shares his love for business, industry, and languages in teaching students about current events, culture, and language in the German-speaking business world.

As an avid environmentalist, he integrates materials on the role and meaning of the environment, environmental protection, regenerative and alternative energies as envisioned and practiced in Germany and the European Union in his Professional German courses at Pitt (Introduction to the German Business World, The German Business (Eco)System).