Forbes.com
May 7, 2009

In 1992, when the signatures on the European Union and NAFTA were still fresh, Elizabeth Elting, a 26-year-old New York University M.B.A. grad, was living with her boyfriend Phil Shawe, also an M.B.A. candidate, their cat Molly and the occasional roach, in a dark, second-floor dorm room. Elting knew there were going to be winners in rising global economy and saw language services as a "particularly viable and necessary business."

She was right. Together with Shawe, she founded TransPerfect Translations, now the world's largest privately owned translation firm. Not bad for a dorm room firm.

Taking out a large credit card advance, Elting rented a $40-per-month computer and bought a $600 fax machine to send out mass fliers to prospective clients.

Since Shawe, then 23, still had a semester of classes to go, Elting solicited most of the business herself. After one month and hundreds of calls and faxes, the first bite came in. The project? Translating a three-page document for a small law firm from English to Slovak.

Elting, a petite, soft-spoken married 43-year-old mother of two, developed a passion for language at a young age. She was primed in Spanish and French after studying at the Toronto French School, living in Portugal and Venezuela and majoring in language at Trinity College. (Shawe speaks only English.) "I always was really interested in words and word games and quotes," Elting says. But Slovak? They took the job and hired a friend of friend to step in. Problem solved.

Elting's original idea was to open a one-stop translation shop that charged less than larger competitors and operated mostly on referrals. It was a business model she developed pre-NYU while working for three years at Euramerica, a translation company then owned by advertising giant Ogilvy Group. "I saw that we only worked in a couple of software (applications) like WordPerfect, which wasn't sufficient," says Elting. "Also, clients would need something done in a week, say a 10-page document translated into Arabic, and we wouldn't be able to do it. I knew I could get things done quicker."

Slowly, more customers trickled in. Although overhead was minimal in the dorm, their goal was to grow the company and have an office within six months. "We were living and working 24 hours a day out of that dorm room," says Elting.

The following year, the duo signed a lease for a shared office on Park Avenue South. The first official employee was hired to make sales calls and perform data entry in June 1994. By the following summer, TransPerfect moved to a 4,300-square-foot office on Park Avenue and hit its first $1 million in revenue; Elting was logging up to 130 hours a week.

Today TransPerfect occupies four floors of that same building. Unlike the NYU dorm room, the office overlooks the entire city. Their lobby is decorated with hip red sofas. It is a $205 million business with 1,800 employees and 4,000 subcontractors in 56 cities including Sydney, Chennai, Beijing, Prague and Houston. Elting added 365 employees to the roster over the past year, and revenues jumped 31% from year-end 2007 to 2008.

And as TransPerfect has grown, its projects have grown both in size and complexity. One job for Genentech and Novartis involved translating 1,000 pages from French to English in order to submit the drug Xolair for FDA approval, and another for the law firm Simpson, Thatcher & Bartlett to turn a series of articles in the complex character of Nepali to English in just three days.

When a project comes in, a first step is to determine whether it is something on-staff linguists can conquer, or should be outsourced to one of TransPerfect's subcontractors. "If it's concerning Finnish nuclear science, that's specialized, and we need the right person," she says.

Co-CEO Elting keeps watch over big projects and clients, while also managing staffing, leadership and training. Last year she chaired a motivational gathering that brought the entire company to New York City for a gala with a keynote by Colin Powell. Shawe oversees global offices, acquisitions and finances. Although Elting and Shawe ended their romantic relationship in 1997 with a broken engagement, they remain business partners; Shawe is still single.

"We want to continue to grow annually at the rate we have and achieve double digit growth every year," says Elting. To do so, TransPerfect has diversified services to fit changing global needs. While language translation, ranging from Portuguese and Marshallese (the language of the Marshall Islands) to Zulu, remains core, the demand for Web site localization and global marketing campaigns has also fueled growth. One recent project involved translating a Bud Light Super Bowl commercial into Swedish. Another involved writing Web copy for Nike's "The Leap" campaign in Japanese and Korean. Over the past two years TransPerfect has set up travel visa offices in 12 countries, staffing them with native speakers.

Globalization has been kind to TransPerfect. "There is still a need for our services," says Elting, "but that's not to say that we're not challenged right now." She is always working on finding and keeping good people across several continents while also providing ample opportunity for advancement.

Surely that's a better predicament to be in than watching your cat chase away roaches in your dorm room.

—by Suzanne Blecher