Steve Boalch

Review of Atlas Translations Ltd.

Atlas Translations has been a favourite agency for...

Atlas Translations has been a favourite agency for freelance translators since the 1990s. In those days there was a friendly little office in Cambridge, the adopted logo being the bicycle, subliminal message being "student bike" reflecting the fact that they had set up shop in a centre of academic excellence. Without compromising one jot or tittle of dedication to translation quality, the telephone manner was flippant and humorous and never hasty.

May be that mindset has kind of stuck, since to this day the affable approach practised in the 1990s by owner Clare Suttie is perceived by anyone who telephones, deals with or visits anyone from Atlas Translations as one that flows down through the whole organisation, whoever you speak to. Suttie has to cover a lot of bases, from delegating project management tasks and responsibility allocations through to captaining crucial pancake races. But she still has the humour and the twinkle.

So how do they achieve this balance between finding time to be human and to communicate with their trading partners and suppliers by means of the human voice what a great idea! instead of slavish reliance on project allocation platforms and online linguist marshalling portals?

Don't know why don't you ring up and ask them yourself.

Probably because communicating humanly instead of robotically either to give lessons in using translation memory software, or to assign a translation to a freelancer actually saves time.

Computer says no ? People says yes.