The Record - Success in any language
Translation firm profits from global economy.
October 14, 2001
Section: BUSINESS
The Record LAUREN COLEMAN-LOCHNER, Staff Writer
Memo: TRANSLATION PLUS – page b06
In the Babel following the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, quiet suffused the offices of Translation Plus.
Clients who had eagerly reached out to non-English-speakers suddenly turned inward. “After Sept. 11, the phones stopped ringing,” says Edna Ditaranto, who founded the Hackensack company a decade ago.
“Everything’s on hold,” says her sister-in-law and partner, Elisabete Miranda.
Translation Plus maintains a network of more than 3,000 linguists, who interpret, translate, edit, proofread, and design. Clients include Englewood Hospital and Medical Center, The Discover Channel, and Hoffmann-La Roche Inc.
Of course, as people emerge from the shock over the attacks and businesses tally the economic damage, it is natural they will retrench at least temporarily, the partners say. But they think a slow economy can ultimately help their business as companies reach abroad for customers.
When they do, they will need not only translation, but navigation through the cultural pitfalls that await.
Take a couple of American brand names: the Pinto car and PayDay candy bars. In Portuguese, pinto is slang for male genitalia; the pronunciation of PayDay means “flatulence.”
And there are more subtle misunderstandings or ambiguities.
Americans invent or alter words in ways for which there is no direct translation. “Mouse,” for example, as in computer mouse. Or a favorite verb, “deploy,” once a military term that doesn’t translate in its broader sense.
Or jargon: The partners were talking about a client, who then called a few moments later. When Miranda answered the phone, she told the client, “What a coincidence, this is a thinking transmission.” In American English: ESP (extrasensory perception).
Both Ditaranto and Miranda emigrated from São Paulo, Brazil. Ditaranto, who holds a master’s degree in translation, moved stateside to study English in 1981.
She settled here, working in a Brazilian bank in New York and marrying an American. When she was pregnant with the first of her three children, she decided to freelance as a translator, allowing her to stay at home. She lives in Paramus.
Through her job at the bank, she got work translating a book for a professor. She wanted to do more.
Her next assignment: translating love letters, and then phone calls, between an American man and a Brazilian woman. (“Did you polish a little bit?” Miranda asks. No need, Ditaranto replies, and she must be right, because the couple subsequently married.)
In 1991, she opened an office in Lodi and hired a cousin to help translate. When her cousin’s visa expired, Ditaranto worked solo – until Miranda arrived in 1994 with her husband and young daughter.
In São Paulo, she and her husband ran a restaurant and a pajama factory. But Brazil’s crumbling economy drove them to the States.
“It was a very good combination, because she had a lot of experience in translation, and I had a lot of experience in business,” says Miranda, a Wood-Ridge resident.
Miranda, who is married to Ditaranto’s brother, arrived speaking no English.
But within a few years, she accomplished a dream: completing her degree in international business at Montclair State (with a 3.65 GPA, her sister-in-law proudly notes).
Miranda says she joined about the time that globalization, and the resulting need for translation services, exploded.
Meanwhile, she says, new technologies, such as software that saves and catalogs frequently repeated phrases in a document, make the work more efficient.
At first, the company performed only Portuguese-English translations. With an estimated 1 million Brazilians in the United States, (concentrated in the Northeast and Florida), there was plenty of work.
But in 1999, Translation Plus added other languages, and its subcontractors now speak more than 180 tongues. Languages most in demand include Spanish (by far the greatest demand, they say), German, Italian, French, and Chinese.
The American Translators Association, a 6,500-member group based in Alexandria, Va., accredits translators. The partners look for accredited people and test them with sample projects.
One current project for a labor group includes translating a 450-page manual for asbestos workers into Polish, an effort that the partners estimate will take 70 days.
Translation Plus acts as a project manager, hiring from its database of subcontractors. For the manual, for example, someone will translate the words, a second person will edit, a third will proofread, and a fourth will format. It has about 300 clients.
Corporate work accounts for about 95 percent of its business, but it also translates for federal agencies and school boards. Clients bring birth certificates and driver’s licenses.
Prices for a 250-word document range from about $40 to $70, depending upon the language used and the nature of the work. For the asbestos manual, for instance, the company hired translators who had backgrounds in engineering, chemistry, and medicine.
Interpreting costs about $500 to $800 per day.
Their goal, the partners say, is to reach the ranks of their large competitors. Many smaller companies have consolidated. And they are themselves acquiring the client list from a former competitor, a move they estimate will boost business by 40 percent.
They have prospered, they say, because they kept current with technology and have business skills.
They also want to do more Web site translations, a huge opportunity, they say, since even some multinational businesses don’t have multilingual sites, and most Web sites are in English.
Since Sept. 11, there have been calls from the media desperately seeking Arabic speakers. But there are not many in the business, the partners say, and as a result, Arabic translations now cost 50 percent more than other languages.
There have also been calls from anxious family members in Brazil. Like many immigrants, the partners say, they often feel divided, attached to their country of birth but grateful for opportunities here.
Says Miranda: “This country gave me so much in such a little time.”
Staff Writer Lauren Coleman-Lochner’s e-mail address is lochner(at)northjersey.com
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