inWhatLanguage: more trust, bigger reach

Some time ago, I came across the followingarticle in Forbes magazine:

“20 Questions To Ask Yourself Before You Relocate For A Job:

If you were offered a job in another city—or your current employer asked you to relocate—would you make the move?

Some would say yes in a heartbeat, while others might struggle with the uncertainty that accompanies such a big change.

According to MyMove.com’s Consumer Insights Study, which surveyed 8,000 consumers, including 6,300 who had either moved homes within the last 12 months or are planning to move within the next 12 months, a new job or transfer is consistently among the top five reasons that people move. About half of them (49%) relocated to another state or out of the country.”

It made me think for a while.

In the times we are living in, relocating for a job has become a sort of “norm". Jobs, good jobs, the kind of jobs that you have spent the best years of your life studying for, are nowadays scarce, and more often than not too far away to even consider applying for without getting ready for a major change of lifestyle. Moving across a continent is a traumatic experience, and even more so when you have a family that has to forcefully move with you.

On the other hand, we are also living in an era where everything can be done from a computer – be it in an actual office, or from the comfort of your own living room. A factor that could perfectly well negate all the trauma of the aforementioned moving process many people have to go through in order to get a job post that is worthy of their qualifications. A factor that should give everyone more freedom and time, hence promoting motivation and efficiency.

Why are these two contradictory facts constantly colliding in today’s society? The answer is easy: it’s a question of trust.

When an employer has enough trust placed in an employee, the employee can work from anywhere he deems appropriate: what’s important is, after all, are the results. And those results tend to be more satisfactory when said employee is living in an environment where he can be himself, he can be close to his family and friends, he can express himself freely in his own language and celebrate customs and traditions that he considers important. In other words, in the country he feels at home.

This is especially critical when it comes to languages. A language agency needs to have a huge network of employees to satisfy a growing demand, and these employees should be natives of many different countries in order to provide the highest degree of quality and localization in their work. This would be practically impossible if the agency demanded that all employees must work from an office, say, in Salt Lake City every day.

If, instead, this language agency focused its energy on finding the best, most trust-worthy language experts who would work from their own respective locations on-demand, providing fast, high-quality translations adapted to the regions that each client specifically asks for, the result would be… Well, ideal.

And that is, precisely, what inWhatLanguage does.