With Technology, Services Find Much Gained in Translations

When Valerie Jones needed some advertising copy speeded to a public relations firm in Japan, she dashed off an e-mail that arrived in Tokyo in perfect Japanese.

Hardly surprising in this wired global age, except that Jones, a product marketing manager for a small software firm in Mountain View, Calif., doesn’t speak the language or even possess a keyboard capable of typing its complex characters.

Instead, she used a new online translation service offered by Redondo Beach-based InterLingua Linguistic Services Inc. Jones simply sent her two-page English document electronically to InterLingua, which routed it to the computer of a translator, who converted it into Japanese and forwarded it to its destination.

Turnaround time: about four hours, meaning that sender and receiver didn’t miss a beat in a business cycle where Japan is sleeping as America heads to work.

“It’s a marvelous service . . . because it’s all about speed,” said Jones, who also was pleased by the moderate $50 fee. “I didn’t have to spend a week looking for a translator.”

Burgeoning international trade, America’s increasingly multilingual society and the explosion of global communications are sparking a mini-boom in the translation services industry. Exploiting new technologies that allow translation to be done more quickly than ever before, entrepreneurs such as Jack Bernstein, co-founder of InterLingua, are finding new opportunities in the fast-growing field.

“It looked like a business for the future,” said Bernstein, who gave up a career in advertising to start the translation services company with partner David Andrews in 1992. “We rolled the dice, betting that it would grow.”

Though no one tracks the exact number of translators and translation agencies operating in the United States, membership in the Alexandria, Va.-based American Translators Assn. has tripled since 1990 to more than 6,000 members. Last year, Business Start-Ups magazine ranked translation services among the top 10 small-business opportunities for 1996.

Fueling that growth is the low cost of entry. A personal computer, high-speed modem and fax machine are all the capital investment most freelance translators--who make up the bulk of the industry’s talent pool--need to launch themselves into business. These high-tech tools have increased productivity, while the Internet now allows freelancers a cheap venue to market their services worldwide.

Such low barriers have encouraged a steady stream of new entrants into the market, which has kept pressure on profit margins despite increasing demand, industry watchers say. But the flip side of all this technology-driven competition is that the translation agencies that hire these independent contractors now have access to a wired global work force.

“We can get talent in Germany or Brazil at the touch of a button,” said Irene Agnew, president of Agnew Tech-II, a Westlake Village-based translation agency that works with a stable of 250 translators worldwide. “We’re no longer limited by geographic location.”

The influence of technology on one of the world’s most enduring occupations can be seen at the Asian Translation Center in downtown Los Angeles. Founder Grace Shimizu has been providing interpreter services and document translation to a mostly Japanese client base in Little Tokyo for nearly 25 years.

Working with a network of freelancers, Shimizu expanded her service lineup over time to handle requests for Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese and Spanish translation in polyglot Los Angeles. Now she’s tackling the language of the Internet.

Although English has become the de facto language of international business as well as cyberspace, companies increasingly are using the Internet to reach foreign customers in their own tongue, or to work with their own non-English-speaking employees via intranets, or proprietary networks within companies.

Thus, Shimizu’s 28-year-old son, Nathan, joined the agency last year to offer Web site translation and other Internet language services to a new generation of clients.

“We’re just a small family business, but this gives us another way to compete,” Nathan Shimizu said.

Indeed, California’s high-tech sector has spawned a new specialty in the field of translation known as “software localization.”

Unlike exports such as avocados or golf clubs, which don’t take a linguist to explain how to use them, computer software must be translated, or “localized,” into the target language to appeal to a mass foreign market. Ditto for CD-ROMs and other multimedia products.

Los Angeles-based Bowne Global Solutions is one of the world’s largest providers of software localization and other high-tech language services. A subsidiary of financial publisher Bowne & Co., the company was formed in March when Bowne merged four foreign software localization companies with Los Angeles-based IDOC Inc., which it acquired in late 1996. Combined sales of the five companies topped $53 million last year.

Ruben Servi, who founded IDOC in the early 1980s with Claudio Pinkus, expects the market for software localization to expand by at least 30% a year for the foreseeable future.

“When we talk about software translation, we aren’t just talking about companies like Microsoft,” said Servi, now senior vice president of strategic development for Bowne Global Solutions. “Medical instruments, manufacturing controls, just about anything that is technical in nature these days has a software component. And if you want people worldwide to use it, it has to be translated.”

Although translation remains a labor-intensive business, advances continue to be made in the field of automated or “machine translation,” in which a computer “reads” a document in one language and spits out a rough translation in another.

Many translators say the technology is still too crude to provide anything close to a clean, coherent document. They assert that machines will never displace humans in bringing style, context and nuance to a translation. Still, new software programs are helping language experts save some steps, particularly on lengthy projects where similar phrases appear repeatedly.

Mark Berry, owner of MCB Systems, a small San Diego-based distributor of language software tools, said his sales have doubled over the last two years as translators seek new ways to boost their productivity. He credits California’s thriving tech industry and the corresponding demand for localization of software, Web sites, computer manuals and the like.

“A lot of this is being driven by the demand for U.S. software worldwide,” Berry said. “But a lot of other industries are using it as well.”

Indeed, most large multinational companies are heavy consumers of translation services. The untapped market is small businesses, said InterLingua’s Bernstein.

Despite the advent of labor-saving language tools, translation remains relatively expensive--anywhere from 10 cents a word for European languages to more than 30 cents a word for Asian languages. That adds up to big money for export-minded small firms, many of which leave the translation work in the hands of their foreign distributors.

By utilizing technology to drive volume up and costs down, Bernstein is hoping to attract more small-business clients with his Global E-Mail Service. For as little as $25, companies can get a short document translated and sent overseas, usually within a few hours.

“We’re trying to appeal to a broader market,” Bernstein said. Still, small firms as well as large ones are realizing the value of quality translation, whether they’re doing business in Los Angeles or Lagos, says translator Manouche Ragsdale. The owner of Intex Translation in West Hollywood says her business has increased 25% in the last year, thanks to a healthy economy and business owners’ recognition that profits sound good in any language.

“Globalization isn’t going away,” Ragsdale said. “Our industry is going to thrive.”