We are super-proud and super-serious about being the top rated language service provider for customer satisfaction.
And it’s not just good business: it’s good sanity. Because when you’re in the customer service business, customer satisfaction is very satisfying. And an unhappy client can really spoil your day.
Accordingly, we survey each client after every job, as part of our ISO 9001 process of continuous quality improvement. If we get a score lower than 7 out of 10, we automatically begin an ISO investigation. Cut to that time-honored stock footage of hook and ladder trucks squealing around corners, squad cars racing down the street, regular workflow pulled to the side of the street. Theatrical? Yes. But a great way to remind everyone what we are trying to accomplish and what is [...]

Everyone seems to think that learning a foreign language is a good idea. Wrong. It takes a lot of time, and causes a lot of headaches, literally. Its exhausting, and most importantly, it’s bad for business.
According to the Department of State, it takes about 2500 hours of serious study to learn a language sufficiently well to function diplomatically in that language, if the language is closely related to English, and as much as 4000 hours for a language less similar, say such as Japanese. Now I don’t’ have time to give you a citation for that, since it’s bound to take as much as three minutes on Google, but you can take my word for it. This also poses the questions: just how much of a foreign language does a [...]

Everyone seems to think that learning a foreign language is a good idea. Wrong. It takes a lot of time, and causes a lot of headaches, literally. Its exhausting, and most importantly, it’s bad for business.
According to the Department of State, it takes about 2500 hours of serious study to learn a language sufficiently well to function diplomatically in that language, if the language is closely related to English, and as much as 4000 hours for a language less similar, say such as Japanese. Now I don’t’ have time to give you a citation for that, since it’s bound to take as much as three minutes on Google, but you can take my word for it. This also poses the questions: just how much of a foreign language does a [...]

A wanna-be business.
So do you wanna be a translator? It’s fun and easy. Join the international jet-set, pick your own hours.
But do you have what it takes? Can you speak another language? Turn a phrase? Catch a sentence in one language and cast it in another?
Plenty of folks out there ready to go, if my inbox is any indication. But my pay-per-click guys don’t like it.
For every legit business prospect, we probably get maybe ten to twenty solicitations from translators or translation services offering services. And every time they click through a Google ad to find us, it costs us a buck or two. So maybe that’s where business opportunity lies, or at least the opportunity to lower Adwords expenses.
I was thinking about this as I [...]