Steve Dept is a founding partner of cApStAn, a niche language solutions provider for international assessments and surveys: He grew up in South Africa, Belgium and Germany and received his education in English, Dutch, French and German. He studied Classical philology and comparative linguistics but is essentially an autodidact and a field practitioner. He is known for ensuring cross-language comparability in major International Large-Scale Assessments (ILSAs) such as OECD/PISA, OECD/PIAAC, IEA/PIRLS, IEA/TIMSS, CONFEMEN/PASEC and UNICEF/SEA-PLM. Steve has coordinated linguistic quality assurance in over 60 multilingual projects and he acts as a translation/adaptation consultant for assessments, surveys and psychometric tests in both the public and the private sector, with a special focus on hybrid workflows involving AI and human experts. Over the years, Steve’s attention has shifted towards optimising the master versions by embedding translation and adaptation in the test development process. His translatability assessment methodology has become an integral part of the adaptation design of all major ILSAs and over forty multilingual surveys. Steve is a frequent speaker at international conferences.