E L I Z A B E T H. E L T I N G - B U R L A N T '87

The following feature story appeared in the campus publication MOSAIC in May, 2000.

An entrepreneuer finds the right word in record time

Elizabeth L. Elting-Burlant ’87 might be described as the Mario Andretti of her profession. Like the legendary racecar driver, Elting-Burlant has used precision and speed to reach the top of her field. But, unlike Andretti, Elting-Burlant negotiates the twists and turns of language rather than the curves of a racetrack.

"Speed is definitely one of the competitive advantages we can offer," says Elting-Burlant, president and CEO of TransPerfect Translations, Inc., one of the largest and most successful foreign language service companies in the world. "Because of our size, we are able to translate 500 pages in two days if a client needs it. Law firms, for example, often require the translation of documents for court, and they just don’t have the time or staff to do it themselves."

Elting-Burlant and the company’s co-founder, Phil Shawe, launched TransPerfect seven years ago in a New York University dorm room with a rented computer and a $5,000 credit card advance. Within six months, TransPerfect had moved to a small office on Park Avenue in New York City. The company has doubled the number of employees and revenues every year since. It now occupies several floors of a midtown high-rise and has a full-time staff of 120 people and 3,500 independently contracted linguists who work in about 100 languages. The company has offices in 16 cities on three continents. Providing language services to more than three-quarters of U.S. Fortune 500 companies, TransPerfect reported revenues exceeding $18 million last year.

The company’s success has not gone without notice. TransPerfect has been featured in articles in Entrepreneur magazine, Inc. magazine, and the Journal of Commerce. Last year, Working Woman magazine honored Elting-Burlant by awarding her its 1999 Entrepreneurial Excellence Award for Customer Service.

Love of language

Elting-Burlant’s interest in language started at age 8 when her family moved to Portugal. There she studied Portuguese and French at school and fell in love with languages. Within a year, her family relocated from Portugal to Toronto, where she deepened her study of languages by attending a French school and exploring Spanish and Latin.

At Trinity, she majored in Spanish and French. She fondly remembers many of her professors, including professors of modern languages Sonia M. Lee, Arnold L. Kerson (since retired), and Dori Katz, with whom she, presciently, took a translation course.

One professor proved particularly memorable. "I took a number of courses with John J. McCook Professor of Modern Languages Kenneth Lloyd-Jones and spoke to him a lot about my junior year abroad. My plan was to major in both French and Spanish and to spend one semester in Spain and the other in France. After talking to him and getting his recommendation that I focus on one language, I spent my entire year in Spain. I was impressed by his reasoning and by his concern for me as a student. He definitely made a great impression on me, because I switched gears and instead of exploring both French and Spanish I started focusing more on Spanish and even started a Spanish Club at Trinity."

A hard-working and gifted student

Says Lloyd-Jones of his former student, "My chief memory of Liz Elting, beyond the fact that she was a hard-working, independent-minded, and gifted student, is that she was very eager to learn and enjoyed being challenged. When she came to explore the question of foreign study with me, I encouraged her to pursue it, knowing that she had the combination of intellectual curiosity and personal dynamism that would enable her to get the best out of it, in both linguistic and experiential terms. She seemed to see every challenge as an opportunity."

After graduating from Trinity, Elting-Burlant used her interest in and aptitude for Spanish in Caracas, Venezuela, where she served a four-month internship in the financial division of the Mendoza Group, one of Latin America’s largest companies. The internship, organized though the International Association of Economics and Business Students (which links students with jobs in industry), introduced her to a business environment that she thoroughly enjoyed.

In 1987, she returned to the United States and was hired as a project coordinator in the New York translation company Your America, then owned by the advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather and later purchased by the translation giant Berlitz. At Your America, she observed that the inability to meet deadlines was creating lost business opportunities. Eager to develop her business skills and advance her own career, in 1990 she enrolled at New York University’s Graduate School of Business, where she met her future partner, Phil Shawe. Together, the pair stretched their entrepreneurial wings and formed TransPerfect in 1992.

Still moving with uncommon speed and precision, Elting-Burlant is busy plotting TransPerfect’s future. Last November, she and Shawe launched a new company, translations.com, inc., to satisfy clients’ growing demand for software and Web localization services.

"After covering almost all the major cities in the United States," Elting-Burlant says, "we also plan to continue opening foreign offices in every major gateway city in the world. We plan on being a very international company."

-Suzanne Zack