Driving Positive Change in the Translation Industry

As an independent, owner-managed translation company, we’ve always prided ourselves on our ethical, value-driven approach to doing business, looking after our internal team as well as our talented freelance linguists and providing safe pathways for budding translators into our industry.

?In 2020, after celebrating a decade in business, we decided to embark on the journey to gain B Corp certification. B Corp is an acknowledged global accreditation for businesses and organisations that are committed to looking not just after their profits, but also after the environment, their people and the wider community they operate in.

Feeling closely aligned with the B Corp ethos, we saw working towards this accreditation as the next natural step on our journey as a value-driven business.?

After an initial self-assessment, we set to work and reviewed our processes and policies. B Corp’s Impact Assessment tool proved to be a great framework for analysing every part of our business, making small and large improvements wherever we could. For example, we:

• Introduced a Code of Conduct for our team and all of our suppliers
• Benchmarked and raised salaries to bring our graduate salaries in line with recommendations from the UK Living Wage Foundation
• Reviewed and improved our benefits package
• Introduced interest-free loans and off-schedule payments
• Set up a Green Committee to foster environmental stewardship in the home office
• Invested in training, resources and tools to monitor and improve the mental health of our remote team

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In July 2022, we were officially certified as a B Corporation, one of the first to do so in the UK, alongside the wonderful team at Comtec Translations. Our accreditation serves as a signal to our team, our customers and to our linguistic community that we are who we say we are, and that we are committed to looking after our team and everyone in our translation supply chain.

Gaining B Corp certification is, of course, just the start. Our aim is to continually improve our own company performance, but also to drive positive change in our industry.

That’s why we’re so excited that the ATC has chosen the topic of Ethics in Business as the theme for this year’s conference: it’s the perfect opportunity and makes good business senses to come together and talk about how we can future-proof our own businesses through sustainable practices, but also how we can – collectively – improve standards and processes to make our industry fairer, more equitable and more sustainable. An industry in which everyone can thrive – including the linguists who play a crucial part in the services we all deliver to our clients.

After all, creating better working conditions for everyone is not just something we should want to do because it feels morally right but because it makes good business sense as well.

We all know that people who are happy, fairly paid and well looked after deliver better work. In the context of translation, better translations lead to a greater impact for our customers, which in turn leads to a greater return on their investment in translation and localisation. Put simply, if we want to best serve our customers, we need to serve everyone in our translation ecosystem.

At the Ethical Business Summit, I’ll be sharing more about our journey to becoming a B Corporation and the things we’re doing right now to improve how we look after our team and our linguistic community.

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About the author

Anja Jones is Managing Director at AJT with experience working in the ethical translation industry as a translator, editor and project manager.

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