Lingvista Turns 10!

Today, Lingvista is a team of professionals consisting of managers, translators, proofreaders, editors, DTP specialists and even voice over talents from all over the world. Our clients are very different: on the one hand, we work with big corporations from Europe, Asia and America. On the other hand, we are always glad to welcome private clients who come to our office in Tomsk to have official papers translated for their personal needs. Our portfolio is constantly growing thanks to new projects and subjects of every kind: from agriculture to cardiology, from subtitles and fiction to complicated technical manuals and safety instructions for nuclear plants. Over the last ten years, we had a pleasure to deal with fantastic languages, such as Yakutian (a language spoken in Sakha, a republic in Siberia), Yupik (a language spoken by Eskimo people in Alaska and Kamchatka), Catalan, Persian, Traditional Chinese and Latin. Lingvista in-house team is small and reactive, which means that instead of churning out, we strive to find a creative and unique approach to every request we receive.

On the wall in our office, there is a huge world map, and some years ago we started a nice tradition of marking new cities and countries of our geography with colorful pins. These are the places where we completed interpretation projects or found new business partners for a long-term cooperation. Only Australia and Africa are left so far. While New Zealand is already 'conquered' – a native English speaker, reliable partner of ours, lives there. Lingvista has stepped outside Tomsk right after it was set up. We started 2011 with participation in a great international petroleum project. At the first step, our interpreters worked in Tomsk, Voronezh and Dzerzhinsk, and later our client took them to several business trips to the USA, persuaded and impressed by their professional skills and flexibility in cooperation.

During that time, interpretation projects anywhere on Earth have become one of key services of Lingvista. We are ready – and we are able – to find interpreters in any city of Russia and abroad, so that our partners would be understood everywhere they go. By 2020, we have provided linguistic support in more than 50 cities around the world. We learned that being an interpreter is the same as being truly courageous. Sometimes our specialists have to reach the site by helicopter (that project took place on a remote oil field far in the Northern Siberia), or master new online platforms for video remote interpretation (VRI). The tables have turned this year, so VRI is most requested now, because business switched to the online mode globally. VRI attracts attention of both Russian and foreign companies for their representatives to actively interact despite of the global lockdown and closed borders. This summer, Lingvista carried out several VRI projects, and now we are getting ready to provide remote simultaneous interpretation for an international online conference that will be held in autumn.

By the way, last summer (2019) Lingvista took part in holding of two big international offline events: The APEC Local Innovation Ecosystem Forum and The Financial Opportunities Fair for SMEs. We welcomed participants and speakers from all over the world here in Tomsk, provided them with interpretation, sightseeing tours around the city, comprehensive support and the Siberian hospitality. One year has passed, and our guests still reminisce about their great trip to Russia by sharing memories on socials. We do hope that such meetings will be possible again soon, and we will not have to use web-based platforms to meet our business partners and colleagues.

Good old written translations weren't left untouched by smart technologies either. Ten years ago, the early versions of SDL Trados were the main CAT tool we dealt with. Now, we cooperate with artificial intelligence by assisting US-based companies in teaching machines to translate like humans do, and making translations created automatically sound natural.

We have changed drastically over the past decade – the whole world actually has. But in this anniversary year of 2020, Lingvista continues to keep an eye on relevant needs of the global business and private customers, adjust to new quality standards and keep up with rapidly developing modern technologies by ensuring reliable language support everywhere.

Let's compare notes in 2030. Who knows what the future may bring? ;)