Professor Reiner Arntz was born in 1943. In 1965/66 he completed his undergraduate studies, qualifying as a translator of Spanish, French, Portuguese and Dutch. In 1971 he completed his doctorate in Law. From 1965 to 1979 he taught at the translation school at the University of Saarland; from 1980 he was Professor for Romance Linguistics at the University of Hildesheim, becoming Dean of Language and Technology from 1984 to 1992 and working on new curricula for International Technical Communication and International Communication Management. From 1992 to 1996 he was head of Language and Law and worked on the development of the department of Ethnic Minorities and Regional Autonomies at the European Academy of Bozen (EURAC). In 1996/97 he was Visiting Professor in Technical Communication and Language Education at the University of Southern Denmark. He was Director of the Institute for Applied Linguistics at the University of Hildesheim until 2007, and Scientific Director of the Language Centre for Bremen Universities until 2008, when he retired. In 2010 he was Visiting Professor at Sakarya University in Turkey, and had started learning Turkish.
In addition to numerous academic articles, Professor Arntz was the author of Das vielsprachige Europa: Eine Herausforderung für Sprachpolitik und Sprachplanung (Multilingual Europe: A Challenge for Language Policy and Language Planning) (1998) and Fachbezogene Mehrsprachigkeit in Recht und Technik (Specialized Multilingualism in Law and Technology) (2001); co-author of Konstrastsprache Niederländisch – ein neuer Weg zum Leseverstehen (Dutch as Contrast Language: A new way to reading comprehension) (2002), Kontrastsprache Portugiesisch. Ein neuer Weg zum Portugiesischen auf der Grundlage des Spanischen (Portuguese as Contrast Language: A new way to Portuguese on the basis of Spanish) (2007), Kontrastsprache Niederländisch: Ein neuer Weg zum Niederländischen auf der Grundlage der germanischen Sprachverwandtschaft (Dutch as Contrast Language: A new way to Dutch on the basis of the Germanic language family) (2008), Einführung in die Terminologiearbeit: Studien zu Sprache und Technik (Introduction to Terminology: Studies on Language and Technology) (2009), and co-editor of Textlinguistik und Fachsprache (1988), Übersetzungswissenschaft : Ergebnisse und Perspektiven (1990), Autonomes Fremdsprachenlernen in Hochschule und Erwachsenenbildung (2008), and Autonomie und Motivation (2011).