By Lois M. Collins
Deseret News staff writer

      Everyone's seen a translation like the one provided in the booklet in the tourist office in Pompeii: stilted English, words that are near-misses, wrong verb tenses. It's a funny read, unless you really need an accurate translation.
      That's exactly the kind of translation that MultiLing, a Provo-based company, promises never to provide to its customers.
      The company, founded in Utah in 1988 and self-described by president Michael V. Sneddon as a "bootstrap operation," competes with multimillion-dollar corporations in the field of translation, an industry that's growing as international boundaries shrink.
      A piece of sophisticated equipment built in Spain might be just what doctors at a hospital in Germany need. But they can't use it if they can't read the instructions.
      That's where MultiLing comes in, providing accurate translation of manuals, contracts, patents, scientific test results. If it's in one language but needs to be in another, regardless of the content, MultiLing's happy to do it, Sneddon said.
      The process is part language technology, part native-speaker savvy.
      The first step is computer-assisted translation, which is different from auto translation, he said, where more likely than not software yields more the "gist of an idea" than the actual meaning. It's then sent to a linguist who makes it "publication quality."
      The company has a number of translation centers worldwide with more than 350 translators and the ability to translate into close to 30 languages, including Bulgarian, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Czech, Danish, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Swedish, Thai and Vietnamese. Most of the work is done in translation centers located all over the globe, including multiple offices in North and South America, Asia and Europe.
      At MultiLing, everyone speaks multiple languages, and few of the workers are U.S.-born, Sneddon said.
      No one set of eyes has control of any project, but instead everything passes through two or three others besides the translator.
      "We have a final quality control team with a translator here," Sneddon said. "We do multiple checks, and the error rate is very low. Sometimes, the quality of output is better than the source language."
      The company, which is privately held (Sneddon is the last of the original founders still on board) has plugged along with an old-fashioned — and unsinkable — business model: Earn it before you spend it.
      "It's rare to see a company that reaches our size with no debt and no venture capital investment. We're extremely stable," said Emmanuel Margetic.
      Most of their employees have been on board for quite some time, too, which is "just as well, because there's no course in what we do. We do a lot of internal mentoring," Sneddon said. They also spent a lot of time training employees on the technology.
      The primary computer-assisted translation technology tools they use are Transit and TermStar. With Transit, people who need translations that include overlapping text can save a lot of money, because it "text leverages," or reuses text from previous documents that have already been translated. Therefore, the more a company translates material, the bigger the database it builds and the more money may be saved. Transit supports, rather than replaces, translators, and it increases productivity.
      TermStar checks the integrity of existing terminology and builds new terminology. It can not only capture terms, but can track their sources, the date the term was entered and by whom.
      Though they're not the biggest translation company, Sneddon said, MultiLing has a nice customer base, including Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Mazda, Caterpillar, Intermountain Health Care, Procter & Gamble and Walt Disney Co.
      More information is available online at www.multiling.com.
     

E-MAIL: lois@desnews.com