Transperfect is one of the largest translation companies in the world. Founded and managed by two business students in an NYU dorm room, Transperfect and its sister company Translations.com have grown into a large corporation with dozens of worldwide offices, hundreds of employees and over $200 Million in annual sales.
How did they get so big? For the most part, they did it by buying other translation companies. M&A (Mergers and Acquisitions) is such a big part of Transperfect that they even have an in-house M&A department led by Thomas Pennell.
I have heard numerous people at Transperfect boast that yearly growth at the company has been in the range of 30%. 30 percent! That is quite impressive, especially when sustained over a period of a few years. One has to ask, how will Transperfect be able to sustain that growth rate? The answer: they won’t, unless they foray into new areas. They already control most of the traditional translation markets such as legal, medical and financial translation. They are also huge in the website localization market and maintain the multilingual websites of many of the dominant Fortune 500 (USA) companies. It would appear that growth in these areas is saturated for Transperfect.
Transperfect has tried but has been unable to make significant gains in the translation software field. They have purchased a number of companies like Alchemy and Astoria Software but none of these companies have been particularly dominant. Transperfect has a lot of catching up to do if it wants to be in the same league as SDL and Lionbridge, who are much more tech savvy.
Which leads us to the most recent news: Transperfect launched a new iPhone translation application. Its called TransPerfect TransImage and it is basically a Google Goggles knockoff. It can translate text in pictures taken by the iPhone, like menus or street signs. It can also translate free text that is input manually by iPhone users. The app is powered by Google Translate.
This move seems strange to me: there is no money-making potential from this kind of app, which is provided totally free. The potential business from the ‘I want a professional translation’ link in the TransImage app seems negligible. So why are they doing it?
The only plausible answer I can think of is that this is a first step by Transperfect to gain a foothold in a new tech field which they are targeting as a growth area. Maybe they are building a cellular network backbone which will help streamline some of their present operations, like interpretation, transcription and court reporting. Maybe something else.
I think that we can expect to hear more news from Transperfect in the near future which corroborates this theory. A new workflow? A new product? The acquisition of a software company with compatible technology? Let’s wait and see.
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