History
The Inbox Translation business idea was first conceived by co-founder Flo Bejgu during an assignment as part of his Master's degree in 2010. It was obviously a good assignment because the company was soon operational when his partner Alina Cincan, a professional translator, joined the business. The name Inbox Translation seemed a natural choice to the co-founders based on their business model, where translations arrive into the client's email inbox. Obvious really. The company is based in London, but this doesn't prevent them from having an international focus. It offers translation services in a range of languages; they specify 60 on their website, however that is not an exclusive list.
Products and Services
The company offers four key services, namely Translation, Interpreting, Proofreading and Localization. Interpreting is not a service that is always promoted or offered by online translation providers, so this initially stands out as a point of difference with Inbox Translation. This service is limited to the UK, where the company calls on a team of trusted and qualified interpreters, who offer simultaneous, consecutive (with a short gap) and whispered (quietly at the same time) interpretation services. The latter is often used in conferences.
The group also specializes in a range of sectors: some are fairly common like marketing and legal, but others like education and literature stand out. Educational translation is a notoriously difficult area (think academic papers, citations and textbooks) but Inbox Translation work with a small seasoned team of professionals with their own area of academic expertise. Literary translation is possibly the hardest area of all, and their crack team of experts need to be familiar with indigenous literary works with the target language and culture.
The pricing model is not as transparent with Inbox Translation as we have seen with our previously profiled translation companies. They charge by 1000 word blocks, but the rate is not publicized on the website as each job needs to be priced depending on a range of factors.
Translation Methods
"No machine translation, no crowdsourcing, no amateurs" is how they describe their translation services; a fairly clear and concise summary I think. Inbox Translation don't state how many translators they employ, however they do specify the standards they work to. In addition to being native speakers of the target language their translators are also native-level speakers in the language they're translating from. I'm not sure how they measure or test for this but it's a reassuring statement for any prospective customers.
Their translators are (of course) bilingual but they're also qualified professionals. Because of their business model, which targets various specialty sectors, their translators work in specialized industry verticals too.
Summary
Inbox Translation have a well put together business offer. They have a family business feel about them, but it works. They are smaller than a lot of their competitors, they are less transparent in terms of the size of their team and pricing, but they also come across as nimble and flexible. They do cater to some very specialized business sectors and I think they have a strong business model from which to grow on.
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