OK, only kidding, but it would be great wouldn’t it? We’ve just signed up for the “Compete for” website, its free to register, and any UK company wanting to tender for public sector business should sign up. The slight snag is that because of our current size, we’re probably not ready for a multi-million pound translation contract yet. However we can deal with large volume jobs, and multiple languages. Here are a few translation stats from last year:

• Most translated language: Hungarian. Its easy to assume that we would translate larger volumes of standard European languages like French or German, but actually we had a client wanting a large volume of Hungarian, and that skewed the stats. There has been a definite trend of more demand for central European languages, and we’ve also translated lots of Polish, Czech, Slovak, and Romanian.  Previous years winners were Simplified Chinese in 2008, and Flemish in 2007.
• Highest volume tight deadline job: 62,000 words into Polish in 5 working days. Not our recommended way to work, but it got our client out of a hole when they had been let down by another agency. To give an idea, its around 6 weeks work for a translator in 5 working days, it was only achievable because we had a team of two translators with a shared database of terminology working very long days.
• Largest number of languages on a single project: 40. That kept the project manager busy. In theory it doesn’t take much longer for a multi-language project than a single language translation, as all the translation team work simultaneously, however there is a much bigger co-ordination and document compilation task for the project manager.
• Smallest value single order: about £20 + VAT for a very short text in a single language.
• Most interesting project: translation for The Commonwealth War Graves Commission English to French, following the find of a First World War mass grave at Fromelles, in France. Any student of history would love this type of project, and our lead translator has extensive experience of this type of marketing and military history translation.
• Strangest enquiry: this has to go to the person who rang us up and said “I need a quote please, not sure what languages, and I can’t send you the text as it hasn’t been written yet, don’t have any clue how long it will be….” Even a few basic facts will make our task easier!
• Biggest achievement: ISO 9001 quality assurance, well not quite, we have the system up and running and are awaiting accreditation, but its been a lot of work, so the champaign is on ice ready for when we achieve accreditation.
• Talking of champaign, we’ve been shortlisted in the Nottingham Evening Post business awards, in two categories, best use of IT and communications, and Small Business of the Year. The ceremony i on 1st July at the Council House. Win or lose, its great to be nominated.

OK, must get back to that translation contract application…

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