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282 283 TRANSPERFECT faster and better than the competition.Their first job was translating a legal document from En- glish to Slovak. From the beginning, Elting and Shawe outsourced the language work to highly specialized freelancers,while putting in 100-hour weeks running the company from Shawe’s dorm room.After seven months in business, the pair moved to a rented office on ParkAvenue South. A year later they hired their first employee and reeled in their first million-dollar client, J.C. Pen- ney. By 1996 they had opened TransPerfect’s per- manent NewYork headquarters, along with offices in San Francisco,Atlanta, andWashington,D.C. Today,TransPerfect is a global firm that operates in 170 languages. It has 100 offices in 90 cities, 4,000 employees, 15,000 sub-contractors, and annual revenues of over half a billion dollars.The company services 11,000 clients, completes over 50,000 projects per year, and works with many of the world’s most recognizable enterprises in the following sectors: Retail & E-Commerce, Life Sciences, Legal,Media & Entertainment, Finance, Advertising,Marketing & Public Relations, Indus- trial &Manufacturing,Travel & Hospitality, Energy &Mining,Hardware & Software Technology, and Government. If its current growth trend continues, by 2019, it is expected to bring in yearly revenues of over $1 billion. “Our core business is translation and other language services,”Elting says.“And that means anything from document translation, to oral interpreting, to website localization, to software localization, to cultural consulting, to foreign lan- guage desktop publishing.The work we do for our clients is extremely labor intensive and we have specialists who work on it–translators, editors, proof readers–these are people with advanced degrees, usually in the field they’re translating.” “We also do a tremendous amount of work for the life sciences industry–that’s about a third of our business; we work for all of the biggest pharmaceutical firms and CROs (Contact Research Organizations) in the world,”Elting adds.“We do over-the-phone interpreting and we do simul- taneous interpretation, as well.We have been involved in several large-scale events for both the government and the private sector. For example, we’ve provided interpretation services for the AT A GLANCE | TRANSPERFECT WHAT: The world’s largest privately-held provider of language services and technology solutions WHERE: Headquarters in New York, NY WEBSITE: www.transperfect.com