Photos by Bob Handelman

The Language of Business

Spend an hour with Liz Elting and you’re likely to notice her energy, her focus, and her interest in everything around her. Spend a day with her and you’ll wonder how she manages to successfully carry these attributes through everything she does, from leading the world’s largest privately held provider of language and technology solutions to raising a family on New York’s Upper East Side. The trick, Elting would tell you, is to pursue a course in life that you’re passionate about. Everything else falls into place from there.

When Elting arrived at Trinity, she chose modern languages as her major. She credits Professor Dori Katz for giving her an understanding of the fact that language fluency does not equip someone to be a professional translator. If you think about it, every single English word or phrase does not have a word-for-word equivalent in other languages. A professional translator has to have strong writing skills and experience in selecting the words or phrases that best convey the meaning and tone of the source document. Having up-to-date knowledge of a language is also essential: witness how quickly “smartphone” became part of our vocabulary. Finally, professional translators need to have industry-specific knowledge. Some fields, like information technology, are changing so rapidly that in order to create the most precise and accurate translations, the translator has to have knowledge of the latest developments in that industry. Elting recalls, “I’m eternally grateful that I enrolled in Professor Katz’s class, ‘Translation: Theory and Practice’; what I learned served as the foundation for the business I would later create.”

That business is TransPerfect. As co-CEO, Elting heads this family of companies that generates revenues in excess of $300 million and operates out of offices in 75 cities on five continents. Elting, along with her partner, Phil Shawe, started TransPerfect 20 years ago out of a dorm room at NYU’s Stern School of Business, where she earned her MBA in international business and finance. It was after she’d received her degree that Elting realized she could combine her passions for language and entrepreneurship to craft a career. Her instinctive ability to anticipate the language needs of the global marketplace was critical to the company’s growth.

At the outset, Elting and her partner maxed out their credit cards to rent computers and start TransPerfect. They worked long hours, doing everything themselves to build a firm dedicated to bringing business know-how and consistent standards of high quality to the translation industry. Their first big break came six months later, when they won a large project translating Russian geology documents. Elting says, “We were on the phone 24/7, overcoming time zones and evaluating credentials to find qualified Russian translators with advanced degrees in geology. We barely had time to eat: sleep was an occasional luxury.” Their rapid success enabled them to move into their first office.

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