Hans Eberstark

Who was Hans Eberstark?

Hans Eberstark was an Austrian linguist, translator, and mental calculator. He was born on 27 January 1929 in Vienna and died on 19 December 2001.

Eberstark often lectured on language and translation in Europe and was known for asking someone whose first language was a small local dialect of German to speak with him; after a couple minutes Eberstark would suddenly start speaking fluently in that dialect.

Of Viennese Jewish origin, he spent eight years in Shanghai during World War II, with many other displaced people from all over Europe. It was there that he was exposed to many different languages. He once told science writer Jeremy Bernstein, that to his "eternal disgrace" he had not learned to speak Chinese "properly" while there, but Bernstein noted that Eberstark's standards for speaking a language were "different from most people's."

In 1965, Eberstark was the founder of the Mensa chapter in Geneva, Switzerland, where he worked as an interpreter with the International Labour Organization. He took early retirement in 1967 and became a free-lance and also taught courses in translating and interpreting at the University of Geneva.