When our translation agency was founded in 1989, I had just stopped working for a construction machinery manufacturer.

I was looking for customers for translations. I telephoned to hundreds of them. It's never an easy operation. It's very difficult to get past the switchboard operator - and email was only just coming in at that time.

Then one day I thought  "I'm going to try the company I used to work for" (I don't know why it took so long to think of it). So I contacted the company and we received plenty of translation work.

Our agency expanded. It managed to weather three recessions (one in the UK, one in the USA and yet another one in France). We translated mostly engineering documents, service manuals and the like, for manufacturers of construction and agricultural machinery, plus technical documents for various engineering companies.

It was still difficult to find new customers.

Then I suddenly understood that the reason why we received so much work from construction machinery manufacturers was because I had worked in that business and consequently I had been able to build up a team of translators who had also been in that business. Our customers had confidence in our expertise and we were supplying their requirements.

What our customers wanted were translators who had practical experience of the industry or profession concerned. Not merely people who have a degree in the language concerned, but people such as engineers, programmers, doctors, accountants, geologists, lawyers, scientists and technicians and bankers, people who knew the business and who also spoke the two languages concerned.

We then had to come up with a procedure for finding such experts. It took time, but after we had completed all the tests, we had assembled a large team of translators with practical knowledge of the fields concerned. We knew that we could satisfy our customers and that they could be confident that our translation will provide correct information to their customers.

The work of a translation agency in 2009 doesn't stop with translating. We use every sort of DTP program and we have the most up-to-date translation memory software to supply translations with harmonised vocabulary and harmonised phrases for repetitive actions.

I'm sure that people in your company responsible for your technical or commercial literature would be very interested to learn about our translation memories, which can cut your translation costs and improve vocabulary consistency in your documents.

You can learn about our translation memory system by contacting us on 01869 240560 in the UK or by email at info@oxtrans.eu and see more about the way we work at http://www.oxfordtranslation.co.uk

John Hadfield

General Manager