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Have Translations…Will Travel: Call Collect International In a Quonset hut in a mountain jungle somewhere in South America a tech specialist sits at a radar console, relying on a manual in Spanish to help operate his country's Northrop Grumman air traffic control system… Neulevel is responsible for promoting the new .biz Domain. Their website talks to potential users in the U.S — and in Japan, Korea, China, Latin America, and Europe. Nine languages… Rio de Janeiro is rehabilitating its telecommunications system, with a clear need for CIENA's advanced WDM technology- and a 300 page RFQ in Portuguese… The 20,000 readers of Auto and Truck International magazine's Latin American Division want their automotive technology in Spanish that is clear and comprehensible anywhere from Argentina to Mexico... High technology translation for documentation and software is an integral function for international high tech business today. Ten years ago, Greg Bathon foresaw the impact of computer/communication convergence on the green-eye-shade world of translation. Today his company, Contact International, is the Inner Harbor nerve center of a worldwide network of 1200 translation experts, most of them advanced-degree professionals, native speakers who specialize in one or at most two closely related areas of technical expertise. Each of them is tested for specialist knowledge, dependability, ability to work as part of a team (necessary for large projects), and each is legally bound to confidentially with a non-disclosure agreement. Some who are U.S. citizens have security clearances. Bathon is a former Navy officer who spent 25 years, much of it in Europe, Asia and Latin America, with the J.Walter Thompson Company, winding up as President of the Latin-America/Asia Pacific Division. What was next? "I don't play golf. One thing I know how to do well is run a service company. And working overseas, I saw the need developing for bulletproof accuracy in technical communication". Then, translation was mainly an "agency" function, relying on generalist translators. Today at Contact International it's a project management function, with a core Project Group knowledgeable in their client's terminology, managing a worldwide networked team via T-1 connections tying together translators, reviewers, software engineers, and desktop publishing experts (FrameMaker, QuarkXpress, PageMaker). Although there is as yet no practical "computer translation", new software has made the process faster, more consistently accurate and more economical. Contact's teams use the latest, one of them a database application that creates a client-specific glossary and a memory of every sentence translated, offering matches from previous work to the translator on a new project. Another recent application has made CAD file language translation about five times faster by automating exportation and reimportation of text strings. The projects listed above are all typical of the work Contact International does for clients throughout the country and across the globe.
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