Romantic stories about the founding of huge enterprises are the stuff of business legends. Films are made about them, books celebrate them. The script is pretty much the same: “It all started in a leaky garage in downtown Los Angeles when I came up with the brilliant notion that everybody would need a (fill in the gap).” Pretty soon these budding entrepreneurs are the darlings of the stock market, with huge fortunes, increasing political influence and model girlfriends.
In 1990, I was organising and delivering language lessons to a variety of local companies. It was interesting, I think I had a good reputation, and it paid the bills. It wasn’t exactly the sort of business that would have the editor of the FT rushing to gather my pearls of business wisdom, but it was personally satisfying.
And then one day, a client asked me if I could use my language skills to translate a document for them. I duly did the work, and more came my way. One project involved a document in Italian and I don’t do Italian. Fortunately, my language put me in the way of various other linguists and pretty soon I had established a good relationship with a few locally based translators.
Over the months, translation work began to get in the way of my real job, delivering language lessons. It didn’t take much intellectual effort to realise that perhaps translation was the way forward, and I intensified my efforts to find more clients and build a network of translators.
And then 1992. Two events caused a change in emphasis. Firstly, the Maastricht Treaty encouraged companies to develop the language skills of their staff. Good. Black Wednesday and the ERM debacle brought about a deep recession. Bad.
Interesting times were ahead. (to be continued)
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