Esprit – first in the market, first in quality

Esprit International Communications is Canadian – Canadian owned and managed, using only Canadian translators for translations destined for the Canadian market. And our trusted friends and colleagues in the U.S., Mexico, Chile and other countries for their specific markets. So your translation is always in context, handled by people living in the target market who understand their own culture, laws, language level, jargon and market trends.

Esprit is one of the original translation houses established in the Toronto market in the early years of the market, and is very well-known for its top quality work. In the early days, Esprit also distinguished itself quickly as THE Quebec translation house in a young Toronto market dominated by a few people of French proposal writing and Belgian origin.

Founded in 1979, Esprit is owned and operated by multilingual translating professionals on site who have over 30 years of experience in the professional translation market. Esprit is not one of those reseller agencies that simply farm out translation work, often to very cheap and non-qualified translators, and then pass on the flawed work to unknowing clients with no professional control or valued-added effort.

We do not approve of the current mass market trying to produce software-controlled translations coming out of certain overseas countries; these are cultures that do not understand properly a number of Western and North/South American languages (or those market contexts), such as French, Spanish and Portuguese, which are rightly considered as impossibly finicky and only understood by the natives of these areas. These “international” or “global” agencies use essay-writing services farm out work to the most immediate and cheapest individuals available around the globe, no matter what their credentials, cultural background and experience may be. The client has no assurance as to who actually does the work. It is so easy for anyone to make all kinds of wonderful claims on an Internet site. And the lower the price quoted, the more you can be sure of substandard work by unqualified translators poorly using automated translation tools.

A major advantage Esprit International offers is our systematic approach to quality control in translation, using translator teams who share in the development of specialized industry-specific and client-specific terminology lexicons for our translation projects. This ensures a much higher level of consistency in the work overall. Esprit is absolutely committed to quality control and excellence in its translations. We make it our business to know the details of our client’s organization and the nuances of their expression, in order to understand the full context of everything. And then we constantly document this. Our clients will tell you how very picky we are in our translations. In the art of translation, picky is indispensable!

Anyone makes promises … but Esprit delivers!

Value-Added Quality * Value-Added Service

Finding enough good words to say about Esprit is not an easy task. In the years that I have been working with Esprit they have done nothing short of a miracle when it comes to expediting our demanding work load and schedules. Thanks again for all your great efforts.

Gary Sczepanski
Senior Graphics Technician
JohnsonDiversey Inc.

I have been working with Judith and Esprit since 1996. They provide excellent service, exceptional experience, great communication and timely turnaround on projects. Esprit is the Only Translator to use! Reliable – Professional – Simple.

Tim Carls
Senior Designer
Design Partners Incorporated

Any Marketing Director knows that when you are juggling hundreds of communications projects annually, having a completely reliable partner like Esprit is precious and rare… I have used Esprit’s services for many years… Esprit rose to the challenge each and every time.

Susan Lilholt
Director, Marketing & Business Development
Global Financial Services Inc.

At Esprit, we PROMISE to go the extra mile to ensure top quality and to “SERVICE you to death” (or at least to a state of contentment and satisfaction)!

more Warm Words from clients…

Are you Lost in Translation?

A word from the President of Esprit International Communications
The problems of substandard translation… read more.

How well travelled are you?

Esprit’s Mexican Spanish Team

¡ En Esprit, sí hablamos español con sello mexicano !

Esprit’s inhouse Spanish team works specifically for the Mexican-dominated North American markets and, as far as we know, is the only authentic Mexican translation team in all of Canada, headed by a professional journalist and translator, Ms. Silvia Méndez, from Mexico City. MSDSs, technical reports and chemical formulations make up a large part of the on-going Spanish work for our long-term Esprit clients. Since most of our regular clients need Spanish for Latin America, and particularly Mexico, as well as French for the Quebec market, our inhouse team members are actually trilingual, so we do cultural and linguistic cross-readings, plus research and development between these two languages, to ensure consistency in style and vocabulary of our clients’ translated materials.

Esprit’s Mexican translation team specifically targets the Hispanic market in North America and Latin America. We have been successful in Mexicanizing materials for a number of major corporations for several decades and we have painstakingly documented Spanish usage in our Esprit house rules, translator aids, and in Esprit client and industry databases.

Now, many translation clients are aware of the omnipresence of the French Canadian Language Laws and the Language Police in Quebec. Since the 1970s, Canada’s laws and booming translation industry changed language usage in marketing and advertising across North America. Strict language laws and rules were enforced for terminology usage, grammar and metrication… right down to the use of quotation marks and the exclamation mark! By contrast, the Spanish translation market in the U.S. and Canada is decades out of step. Quite similar to the French translation market three or four decades ago, today’s Spanish market is chaotic, disoriented and hopelessly out of context with respect to the reality and needs of the Spanish marketing needs of North American corporations.

Today, the United States and Canada are becoming trilingual with the boom of the Mexican market. Every label, every training manual, every government service needs to be in Spanish. But … training of Spanish translators has not kept pace with the market need. Many non-Mexicans are used to translate for a market in which everyday words are totally different from those used in Chile, Colombia, Puerto Rico or Argentina. Yet the Spanish demand is for Mexican Spanish in Mexican-dominated markets. Briefly, Spanish translators are all doing their own thing; many are freelancers who have never been trained in a professional environment; many more have no formal education in translation. There is no cohesion, no methodology, no standards being applied as compared to the Canadian French experience in the North American market.

Enter Esprit. Right from the 1980s we were researching and standardizing Spanish usage for our clients’ translations. We created databases; we held training seminars; we designed and enforced rules of usage; we created and documented lists of thousands of names of products lines and MSDS facts; briefly, we documented everything in sight! There were few resources in those days and that was before the transformation of the Internet. So our investment in R&D has been truly extensive. Esprit is unique in North America with its development of an authentic Mexican translation team ensuring quality control inhouse. En Esprit, garantizamos español con sello mexicano, con servicio rápido y amigable.