Picture trying to have a conversation with a stranger in rural Costa Rica and Google Translate just isn't cutting it. Or maybe you're a nurse trying to explain a procedure to a non-English speaking patient and want to make sure you get "bone marrow transplant" right. Tampa-based Day Translations launched a new product Wednesday which makes it all just a bit easier.
The company, which has translation services for written language and interpretation services for spoken words, has been in the area for a dozen years but launched its newest offering to help with the smaller-scale translation and interpretation problems.
"We made it as a gift to our client; we made this for them," CEO and president Sean Hopwood said. "And it's also a branding thing — it brings more things into the company. [The customer] will use it for smaller thing then contact us for more complicated work."
Hopwood said while the app uses the same software as Google Translate, the difference is his company can also offer a live person to help if the in-app translation is too complicated.
"We’re a service, they’re just a software company," he said. "They have their app which works well, but we have the human side. You can request a human to get support and advice...if you're working in a hospital and need to translate really important words, you have to have a human to take words into account."
Day Translations is in nine offices across the U.S. and 12 countries in the world, including Costa Rica, Germany and the UAE. It is on track for $5-6 million in revenue by the end of the year, but Hopwood is hopeful they're closing to the $8 million revenue range.
Right now the team is working on Day Digital, which is offering cloud management and linguistic marketing for their language clients.
"The language services industry includes not just what I do, but technology as well," Hopwood, who speaks four languages, said. "Language has always been an amazing thing to be involved in; all the languages that diverged and there are so many dialects. I can't know them all, but I would like to know about all of them."
