TRANSLATING TALENT INTO BUSINESS

Interview by Lisa Firth

Although Mark Williams is only 22 years old, he already has his own translation company, Echo Language Solutions, which has now been running for six months. The company provides translations in English, Spanish and German.

"I did a year abroad before setting up Echo," says Mark. "I worked for a translation agency in Germany. The agency wasn’t great: it was quite unprofessional. I did get some insight though; I learnt how not to go about things at least. The customers at this place were not treated as well as they should have been, the company didn’t have the resources to treat them well. That’s something I hope I’ve avoided in managing my own business."

Mark sees having his own business as a way of holding on to his freedom and an opportunity to run things the way he wants. "When I decided to start up my own company it seemed like the best option," he says. "I was in my final year and I didn’t want to get bogged down with job applications and so on; plus I hadn’t decided where I wanted to live or anything."

Mark acknowledges that he has encountered problems since he began running his own small business. He is particularly verbal when it comes to discussing the problems of working alone. "It’s true when they say it’s lonely at the top; working alone, you begin to feel isolated. It’s all about self-motivation, getting a good balance of work and play. Because I’m working from home and it’s just me in the house all day I try to break up my work by having dinner with friends or whatever, so I don’t feel quite so cut off."

"The thing about this business is that it isn’t cash intensive," Mark says concerning the issue of funding. "All I really need is a computer, my dictionary and a fax machine. I did have contacts if I wanted to apply for funding, but because of the nature of my business I wasn’t entitled to a lot of the funds and loans provided by local government. There were regulations which specified that a certain percentage of my clients had to be based in the North East, and of course the majority of my clients are based abroad in Germany or Spain. I used my savings; I knew I could probably recuperate them in a reasonably short space of time."
"One of my marketing techniques was that I exploited my age," Mark explains when asked how he intends to recover the money he has invested. "Not a lot of translators are 22 years old; they tend to be thirty plus and not confident with the web, email or other aspects of IT, and the up-and-coming companies these days don’t want that. They want someone who’s been brought up in what’s called the e-culture. The way
I found my niche was to target the new dotcom companies, the young, small, futuristic businesses who wanted to employ a young and computer literate translator rather than someone with experience."
"I never really intended to have staff who I employed," Mark says of his company’s expansion since its initial conception. "However, through agency contacts I’ve managed to build up a network of translators with a similar style to me who all trust each other to do a good job with each other’s work, and we do pass jobs between us from time to time."
In spite of his intention not to take on any new staff, Mark does have definite plans for the future of the company. "I’m not sure yet which way it will develop," he elucidates."At the moment I’m doing a postgraduate course in Legal Interpreting, so when that’s completed I might focus less on the translation and more on the interpretation, but I don’t know yet how to market this or if there is a market for it. Hopefully I’ll have my ideas sorted out and start putting them into practice by next June."

Mark first had the idea for Echo in the final year of his degree course. He became aware of the Enterprise Exchange workshops at the start of his academic year but did not attend anyway until about halfway through the year. "I went to see Rachel [Orange] at the Enterprise Exchange and told her that I didn’t really know what I wanted to do," he explains. "It helped just to talk someone: she gave me encouragement and helped me bring my ideas to fruition. I wanted to have a business ready to go into straight after my finals and the Enterprise Exchange helped with that."

"My advice to anyone in a similar situation would definitely be to talk it out to someone," says Mark. "Even if you get no information back from them, it can be useful just to set your ideas out to someone else and arrange them into a form that another person can understand. You become more self-aware and the pitfalls involved in your idea might become more obvious."