“Language shapes the way we think and determines what we can think about.” American Linguistic and Fire Prevention Engineer Benjamin Lee Whorf correctly highlighted the importance of language learning in education.
And it stands true for businesses as well. Today, the digital revolution and social media have blurred geographical boundaries. However, lack of quality and trusted translation services in the market have been limiting companies to communicate with their audience limiting their success in the global market.
Ulatus was founded to provide quality translation services considering this market gap. Since its inception, the company has been working on a mission to lessening language barriers for academic and corporate purposes by hiring expert translators in several countries.
“We firmly believe that language should not be a barrier for businesses aiming to capture local markets to expand their geographical presence,” says Shilpa Sanghai Mittal, the CEO of Ulatus. With this guiding philosophy and visionary leadership, Ulatus has been empowering companies to communicate with their audiences in global markets in their native language.
And now working on its motto ‘Localize to Globalize’ Ulatus strives to go beyond language translation to support brands to build a strong local presence.
Read the following interview to know how Ulatus was established, how the company’s services are making difference for its clients, and its technological approach to thrive in the future.
Enlighten us with the journey of Ulatus so far.
I started Ulatus when I was 27 years old after I noticed that there was a lack of translation services for academic purposes. We started by hiring translators from Japan and bridging the gap between clients and translators. After this model proved to be a success, we expanded into several other countries and diversified our offerings in the translation industry.
Today, Ulatus is present in over 125 countries and provides translations to most of these countries. We have a team of around 100 people in Mumbai, 15 people in the Japan office, 4 in the US office, 6 in the Korea office, and 6 in China. Apart from this, we have over 2,000 translators who work for us remotely from across the globe.
Share with the exclusive products or services Ulatus offers.
Ulatus primarily offers 50+ language translation solutions to academic researchers and authors to get their research published in international peer-reviewed journals. We also help corporate firms appeal to different global audiences in the languages they understand. The company offers Chinese, Indic, Korean, Japanese, Spanish, and Portuguese language services amongst other languages.
Additionally, we also deliver solutions like interpretation, book translation, pharmaceutical and medical localization, website, game, app, and finance localization amongst others. Under our life science localization offerings, we offer services such as regulatory submission translation, linguistic validation for pharmaceutical companies, medical device translation, and work with well-known biotech companies as well as CROs for their requirements.
What kind of challenges the company and its team faced when entering the niche industry?
The translation industry is huge and to even be recognized as a brand here requires immense effort. With a $47 billion+ industry, there is loads of competition here. So, entering and surviving this competition requires one to be different and specialized, and hence our start was to be experts at providing language solutions in Asian languages specifically.
Another challenge is that this industry is continuously evolving from one language and service to another (translation, localization, technological solutions, etc.). Technology is getting better day by day. Thus, we also need to keep evolving in what we offer to clients. This requires constant market intelligence and innovation. Building a team competent to handle varied and unique client requests is a challenge we accepted and successfully achieved early in the business. The success of Ulatus today should be attributed to its hardworking and intelligent team.
How have technological advancements and innovation in the industry impacted/enhanced the business of the company?
Like most other industries, technology plays a large part in translation as well. As automated translation slowly comes to the forefront, we have had to also adapt to ensure that clients get what they are looking for. In recent times, automated translation has become popular and is being used for many reasons which have made it more important.
We have used our years of experience and super-efficient linguists to make our own proprietary AI-based machine translation with the highest quality and value available in the market today. We have also used technology to speed up our processes, shorten turnaround times, and improve the accuracy of human translation.
What are your strategically driven plans to be implemented to scale the business in the upcoming year?
This year we want to focus on upcoming markets related to cybersecurity, interpretation, game localization, and e-learning. Considering how the world has evolved to be more online, we feel that these markets have improved in potential and can be an opportunity for growth.
Our focus, however, has always been client satisfaction and top-notch quality of service. We have always treated retaining our current business as the best foundation for growth and will continue to do so in the future as well.
What does the future look like for the company in terms of growth and expansion?
We aim to be one of the most recognized and trusted language solutions company for many language pairs. Globally we want Ulatus (www.ulatus.jp) to be the first choice for clients seeking translation service across industries.
Achieving this will take a lot of work and patience but we are currently focused on quality and our dedication to client satisfaction. We’ve been growing steadily over the last couple of years, and we expect to do even better in the years to come. Blending technology with quality has worked for us so far and we will continue to do that more efficiently, in times to come.
Shilpa Sanghai Mittal, | CEO | Ulatus
