Elizabeth Colón will receive Nawbo Chicago‘s 2015 Woman Business Owner of the Year award on April 27. Colón, president and founder of Metaphrasis Language & Cultural Solutions, has won similar honors from the Small Business Administration, Enterprising Women magazine and the La Raza Spanish-language newspaper. Although a tiny player in the $37 billion interpretation industry, the Chicago-based company exceeded $2 million in revenue in 2014. Colón explains how customer feedback swayed her to buck high–tech translation.
Q. How does it feel to win these awards?
A. It’s an amazing feeling coming from my humble roots. My parents are from Puerto Rico, and my mother raised six children as a single parent. We grew up on public aid. My mother instilled values that are important for everyday living like education, being honest and working hard.
It’s not about the revenue and how fast we’re growing but that we stay true to who we are as a company and we’re making an impact and giving back to the community.
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Q. What is your annual revenue and growth?
A. In 2012 we were at $1.8 million, 2013 was $2 million and 2014 was $2.1 million. We have six full-time employees. The interpreters we use in the Chicagoland area is 160, but nationally we work with over 600. There are also translators in there, too, and that’s a hot area. An interpreter renders information orally and a translator does it on paper.
Q. Do you plan to offer remote interpreting?
A. We decided not to do it. The feedback we’ve received from our clients is that they really like us for the traditional, face-to–face model. We test every interpreter in their target language to make sure they’re at the level and quality we want them to be.
Q. How does the boom in translation apps affect you?
A. I don’t think it has hindered our ability to grow at any capacity. There is a human element that’s missing in machine translations. If you want to know “door” in Spanish through Google or Babelfish, you’ll get your answer. But you’re not ever going to get the true meaning of a sentence or paragraph through those machines. So when I look at the liability factor, I don’t foresee that we will use it.
Q. How has your business evolved?
A. When we started in 2007, there was a huge need for education because there are standards of practice, a code of ethics and certain techniques that we follow. In 2010, we opened the Chicago office with a training facility where companies send their employees for training and prescreening to be sure they’re bilingual enough to be hired. We created courses for healthcare interpreters where they can get continuing education credits. Now there is movement to become certified as a legal interpreter in the court setting. I hired someone to create and teach a curriculum on legal interpreting.
We’re opening the Language Learners Academy in Frankfort (southwest of Chicago). We brought in Edwin Rivera as CEO (of the Language Learners Academy) to create and oversee this academy where we’ll teach kindergarten through 5th grade-level Spanish, Mandarin and French.
Q. How are you diversifying your industry expertise?
A. If event-planning companies have clients from different countries that come to Chicago, why can’t we provide interpreter services that they outsource to us? Some event planning we did two years ago was very profitable. Another area is advertising and marketing.
Q&As are edited for length and clarity.
MacArthur is a freelance writer for Blue Sky.
CORRECTION: This version reflects that Edwin Rivera is CEO of Language Learners Academy, not of Metaphrasis Language & Cultural Solutions.