By Olaf Growald
Thanks to globalization, the business world is shrinking. That’s good news for those who translate like Hana Laurenzo, owner and CEO of Teneo Linguistics Co. in Fort Worth. The Prague native moved here to follow her husband in 1999 after she had created a successful translation company in the Czech Republic. She re-started her business in 2007. Today, her company employs 12 people in Fort Worth and 1,500 freelance translators, reviewers and terminologists around the globe. Teneo Linguistics offers more than 150 languages and grew 40 percent last year. Laurenzo, 48, speaks five languages: English, Czech, Russian, German and Slovak.
Always a Challenge Out There “We offer 150 languages, but we’re always adding new ones. We had a customer call and say ‘I called everywhere, and I can’t find anyone to do this language.’ I’m thinking the way entrepreneurs think — oh, challenge! So, I ask him the language, and he says, ‘Dhivehi.’ It’s spoken in the Maldives [the island nation south of India]. So I said, ‘Let me see.’ It was an agency of the federal government that mitigates risk. They needed the translation for user manuals for airport scanning equipment and training manuals. We found the five translators in Dhivehi. I tracked them down through a newspaper story and emailed the journalist to find them.”
Texas Speak More than Texan “There are only about 300 languages where you could buy a textbook and learn from them. The Census says North Texas alone is home to over 70 different language minorities. People have the impression it’s Spanish or nothing else. Think about if you’re an employer in the area, you have workers who speak other languages, and you need to translate things like training manuals, safety instructions. Our largest customers are international, but there’s enough going on in our own backyard here for me to provide translation and interpreting services.”
Pharma Sweet Spot “Life sciences is a huge vertical for us; we even have a separate life sciences division. Let’s say you have a new X-ray machine, and you get a customer in Germany you want to sell it to. Nowadays, by law, you have to translate everything about your product into all languages of the EU in order to be approved to sell. You’re talking more than 20 languages you must translate in. It needs to be done well, and there’s always new versions, new editions.”
Why Translate? “We in the U.S. have somehow been conditioned that traditionally English should be the language of business around the world. Today, there are still people who wonder why they should even translate. So here is why: Psychologically, the sweetest sound to anybody’s ears is the sound of their mother tongue. If you present your information about your company service or product in someone’s mother tongue, they are immediately much more likely to buy and be interested in your product. Even if they speak excellent English.”
Google Translate “I would not use it in business in general. We had a client selling a conditioning product online in Germany, and Google translated it to air conditioning. After we fixed it, they began selling. Another problem with Google Translate is everything you put in the search window ends up in the public domain. It can be reproduced, used and modified.”
Accelerator EO Member “I started about five years ago as an accelerator member of EO. Accelerator is the program in EO intended for people who had not yet broken the $1 million revenue mark. So, they need to have more than $300,000 in revenue, but not yet $1 million. The purpose is to help them get to the $1 million level. I graduated from the Accelerator program 1 1/2 years after that and became a full member.”
