The business opportunities created by the Internet and a global economy are on display in an office building off State Route 3 in Pennsylvania's Spotsylvania County.
Only about a half-dozen people work at JPD Systems' headquarters, but that small staff oversees a fast-growing operation that employs about 400 highly educated people all over the world.
JPD Systems offers a wide range of translation, editing, proofreading and publishing services. Its staff translates everything from highly technical government documents on microeconomics to paperwork needed to adopt a child overseas.
The company's local staff receives the materials that need translating, formulates estimates on cost, decides which of their freelancers around the world can best handle the job, recruits new translators, shepherds the work through the editing process and gets the translated materials back to customers.
Because of time zones, JPD Systems is able to work around the clock, leading to quicker turnarounds for the customer. As an example, a job request might come in from the United Nations at 5 p.m. local time. It might go to a translator in California, who could work on it into the night before sending it to an editor in Thailand. The U.N. could get the finished product back less than a day after sending it out.
Jean-Paul Dailly, who was born in Brussels, started the company in 1997 after 22 years working for the World Bank. While overseeing operations in French-speaking Central Africa, he saw how poorly some World Bank materials were translated between English and French.
Dailly said many poorly done translations are too literal and fail to understand the culture of the people reading it or the intricacies of their language. He thought JPD Systems could offer higher-quality translations by employing a network of writers and editors familiar with the nuances of various languages.
He and his wife, Clarisse, started the company out of the basement of their Northern Virginia home. The World Bank was their largest customer at first, but through word of mouth they have developed clients ranging from the world's largest economic development organizations to private businesses and individuals.
"People all over the world start knowing about Fredericksburg because of us," Jean-Paul Dailly said.
French and Spanish translations are JPD's biggest business, and Portuguese, Arabic, Chinese and Russian round out the firm's "core" languages along with English. They also have a network of translators who can handle dozens of other languages.
If they need new translators, they find them through a variety of international classified websites, test the most qualified applicants' language proficiency and handle interviews online through Skype. The company now translates about 300,000 words a month, only a small part of which are done at the local office.
No comments:
Post a Comment