BigTranslation: Breaking Down Language Barriers and Facilitating Growth During COVID-19

Eve Pattison, Operations Manager at BigTranslation tells us about providing a service specifically adapted to today’s fast-moving and ever-more digital world.

First of all, how are you and your family doing in these COVID-19 times? 

Eve Pattison: Thank you for asking. Luckily we are all doing fine at the moment. A huge thanks also to all those who have been on the front line making sure that as many of us stay as safe and well as possible!

Tell us about you, your career, how you joined BigTranslation.

Eve Pattison: BigTranslation is a translation agency that was founded in 2015 with the aim of providing a service specifically adapted to today’s fast-moving and ever-more digital world. 

My background has always been in translation, and I was lucky enough to join the company at the moment of its conception. I participated in the launch and have had the pleasure of experiencing how the business has flourished and grown over the last 6 years! 

The core foundation of the company has always been our dedication to providing top-quality service and forging long-lasting partnerships with our clients. As such, we work exclusively with professional native translators to ensure the best possible result for every project.

Our services are orientated towards the needs of companies that are creating high volumes of digital content, expanding into new markets, or localizing their materials to optimize communication with all their customers.

How does BigTranslation innovate? 

Eve Pattison: I’m so glad you asked this question because I think that ‘innovative’ really is the definition of BigTranslation. In situations like this pandemic, if you don’t innovate and adapt, you won’t make it! 

We’re constantly innovating in different ways, for example, through the development of new technologies. Good examples would be our Instant Quote option, for placing orders online 24/7 from anywhere in the world, our translation platform, where we centralize and manage all our projects and our translation API that allows clients to create an interface that suits their needs and order translations directly, ready for integration in their system.

We also innovate with all of our internal processes; for example, we employ Agile methodology, something not often associated with or taken advantage of in the translation sector. This has provided numerous benefits in terms of productivity and efficiency.

Ours is a team that doesn’t like to conform, so we are constantly looking for new ways to improve every aspect of our work! 

How does the coronavirus pandemic affect your business finances?

Eve Pattison: We specialize in translations for diverse sectors, including eCommerce, retail, tourism and leisure, marketing and media, and education, among others. As such, we’ve witnessed firsthand how the pandemic has affected different sectors in different ways. 

For example, obviously, the tourism industry has, unfortunately, taken a big hit over the last year, so we noticed a marked decline in demand from that area. 

On the other hand, sectors such as eCommerce were experiencing huge growth and a surge in demand, which meant a big increase in translation requests. 

Many retail companies have also been digitalizing their business models in order to adapt to the current landscape and take advantage of new opportunities, and we’ve been there to help them internationalize and reach new markets.

All of this meant that overall, fortunately, and with a lot of hard work from the team throughout, things stayed balanced out for us.

Did you have to make difficult choices regarding human resources, and what are the lessons learned?

Eve Pattison: Thankfully, we have not only avoided making difficult decisions, but we were actually able to increase our staff! The fact that our entire workflow is digital and can be implemented remotely meant that our team was able to continue working from home, and our workload was sufficient enough to warrant the incorporation of new members of the team.

In addition, although we are used to working with thousands of translators all over the globe, having our project managers, sales department, marketing team, etc., all working remotely too allowed us to perfect more of our processes and improve communication and protocols.

How did your customer relationship management evolve? Do you use any specific tools to be efficient?

Eve Pattison: For us, it was clear from the start that, during the pandemic more than ever, our relationship with customers needed to be one of support and flexibility, working hand in hand to adapt to new and different needs that arose from one day to the next. We have always prided ourselves on our excellent partnerships and close working relationships with customers, and this has become even more crucial over the last year.

Obviously, the situation meant that we needed to make sure that communications were as simple and effective as possible and information was readily available. As such, we increased our use of multimedia, sent sectorial updates and information directly to clients, and even created free multilingual materials to help businesses display security measures, for example.

Did you benefit from any government grants, and did that help keep your business afloat?

Eve Pattison: No, luckily, we haven’t needed to rely on government grants to keep us going.

Your final thoughts?

Eve Pattison: My final thoughts would be on the importance of being ambitious with goals, even in the face of adversity, and on the need to always identify possible opportunities in every situation and innovate to meet the demands of the constantly changing, fast-moving world we are currently living in!

Your website?

https://www.bigtranslation.com/