How We Are Different

It is customary for translation companies to boast of the impressive number of languages they handle, the wide range of fields in which they work, and the variety of services they provide. In other words, they employ a jack-of-all-trades business model.

We work with a single language pair in a single field, and the only service we offer is written translation. In short, we are a specialty shop. We do one thing, and we do it well.

Because they sell to the entire translation market, the only way they can provide translations in so many fields and in so many languages is to rely on freelancers to do the actual translation work. That is why they will boast of the thousands or tens of thousands of translators in their database. They are agencies—they don’t do the work themselves, but arrange for others to do it.

Because we focus on a single sliver of the translation market—Japanese legal translation—we have been able to accumulate and develop field-specific know-how and expertise. We are a team of professional translators. We don’t need to rely on freelancers to get the job done—we can do it better ourselves.

The dirty little secret of the translation industry is that companies skimp on editing—that is, quality control. They’ll send a document out to a freelancer, maybe have another freelancer give the translation a cursory once-over, and then hope that they got everything right.

When it comes to quality, we take no shortcuts. No translation leaves our shop without being thoroughly edited, word for word, line for line. All editing is done in-house, in our offices, and we stand behind every word. Editing is hard work; it’s time-consuming and labor-intensive—and essential.