Nos permite traducir eso por usted?

If the answer is si (or oui or ja or da or hi), The Geo Group may have landed another client. In English, that first sentence is, “May we translate that for you?” And it tells you what the Middleton based corporate communications company specializes in.

Almost all of the business the firm does is translation, involving everything from translating product instructions into foreign languages to setting up translators for corporate meetings for American firms with foreign branches.

Finding and exploiting that niche has been the key to success for the 8-year-old company, which is owned by the husband-and-wife team of Scott and Georgia Roeming.

“When we were video producers and an advertising agency the competition was fierce and we couldn’t get that work,” Georgia Roeming says.

“I suppose we’d be surviving but not to the level that we’re surviving now, ” adds Scott Roeming.

Success means revenues that are on pace to double this year, a 10-employee staff that is growing, the addition of a second office in suburban Chicago with plans to add many more and a 100-company client list populated by heavy hitters such as Harley Davidson, Rayovac and Turtle Wax.

“Our goal is to open up more offices, definitely all over the country, possible all over the world,” Scott Roeming says.

They plan to do it on their own and from Middleton, a task made feasible by the Internet and overnight mail.

It’s all heady stuff for a company. Georgia Roeming left Meg Communications to start in 1991 as a video production firm. When Scott Roeming left his radio job and joined the company in 1994, they added marketing.

“The plan was after five years I would join, but I was tired of doing what I was doing,” Scott Roeming says. “It was a big chance. The company was doing OK. We just felt it was the right time to make the leap and add the marketing.”

However, it wasn’t long after they moved almost exclusively into translating.

The key was the work the company was doing for Bou-Matic, a Madison-based dairy equipment maker that is part of DEC International.

“We produced some videos for Bou-Matic,” Scott Roeming recalls, “and they said, 'Oh these are pretty good ones, but we need these for foreign markets.' We said, 'We can do that, ' and that's how we started doing foreign translations.”

They did their first translation work for another company in 1994, and quickly realized they had found a niche they could exploit.

“When (Bou-Matic) asked us to do it, we started looking around trying to figure out how we could get it done and there weren’t many companies out there that offered those services,” Scott Roeming says. “It was obvious that there was a need out there and there was really nobody fulfilling that need. We didn't know how big the void was, but we decided this was something we were really going to concentrate on.”

The NAFTA and GATT trade agreements and the growth in the Internet also helped by fueling a boom in international trade. For example, exports by Wisconsin firms rose from $6.1 billion in 1991 to $11.1 billion in 1997, before dropping back to $10.6 billion in 1998 due to turmoil in the global economy, according to the state Department of Commerce.

“There is just more need for these kinds of services,” Scott Roeming says.

The GEO Group found its first translators at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, added others through friends and trade groups, and now uses the Internet extensively. The company uses more than 200 translators across the world by contract, and also has several specialists on its staff.

“Having people on staff that understand and can translate what we do is essential in making sure we get it right,” Georgia Roeming says.

The GEO Group tries to hire native speakers so they understand a country’s culture and can help avoid embarrassing mistakes.

“You do not translate word for word -- a lot of things do not have an exact translation from English,” Georgia Roeming says.

“In may cases we’re developing words for certain companies that can be different for different companies in the same language depending on which country they’re from,” her husband adds. “Spanish is not just Spanish. You have to know where it’s going.”

The Roemings feel that a strength of their business is that they are business people with marketing backgrounds. Neither does the firm’s translating.

Steve McDowell, a technical writer at Bou-Matic who often works with The GEO Group, agrees.

“They’ve got a lot of sales experience and have always been real cognizant of providing really good service,” McDowell says. “They go out of their way to provide quick turnaround time and do rush jobs when it comes up.”

McDowell points to a recent overseas tour a Bou-Matic milking team took that Suzanne Bonn of The GEO Group joined.

“It was more or less an in-house training thing, but she came along so she could get a better idea of our product,” McDowell said. “So they have a lot of interest in learning about our company and the product we sell.”

The GEO Group also offers everything from the staples of French and Spanish to more exotic languages like Japanese, whereas the typical one-person firm specializes in just one language.

“Typically bigger companies need several languages, and we can do some design and other work, rather than just translation,” Georgia Roeming says.

The GEO Group also is using special software that allows it to build databases for each of its clients.

That software helped the firm land Harley Davidson, says Ron Mundt, the Milwaukee-based motorcycle maker’s director of service communications.

“We were impressed with their quick response to our questions and their relatively high knowledge of the industry, and the fact that they were using some new software to aid in translation I had heard about from some other companies,” Mundt says. “And it helps that they’re fairly adjacent to us.”

Harley has used other translators in the past but was looking for quicker turnaround time with the translation of its 2000 service manuals when it chose The Geo Group.

“Hopefully the software will quicken the process,” Mundt says.

The GEO Group hasn’t completed any of the manuals yet, but “they have lived up to our expectations so far,” Mundt says.

Nos permite traducir eso por usted?