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About The Company – Edinburgh Legal & Financial Translations

Our Company

Locally owned, ELF started life as a boutique translation firm in the legal and financial sectors. Whilst this continues to represent our core business, we now offer translations in all sectors and across all language combinations. In today’s exhilarating global marketplace, geographical location is no longer a constraint: we look for business worldwide and our clients are spread over the entire globe. However, we’re still small enough to make sure our service still has that personal touch. Whether a freelance translator or one of our clients, you’ll always deal with the same person for enquiries, orders, follow-up issues and payment. And you can keep in touch by phone, email, whatsapp or skype: whatever is easiest.

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Our Translators

Our translators are the life blood of the company. This is why we make every effort to find reliable people with proven expertise in their specialist fields. We scour the world to find the best translators, and if you need linguists familiar with specific regional variants (say Brazilian Portuguese or Canadian French), we’ll make sure we work with a native speaker from that country. Whilst good translations by no means come cheap, we try and strike the best balance between fair remuneration for the translator and the best value for money for our clients. However, we won’t skimp on quality, and we’ll never work with a translator on cost grounds alone. Being a translator is not simply about being able to speak two languages. It’s a profession in its own right where building the right skill base takes years, and the learning curve never stops – even for translators with decades of experience. We therefore require that our translators have at the very least three- years’ full-time experience as a translator. Finally, an absolute requirement is that our translators are genuine native speakers of their target language. And we won’t consider a translator to be a native speaker simply because he or she has lived for an extended period in a second language environment, or even because he or she speaks a second language at home, or even learned it from his or her parents. Being a native speaker is also about understanding the cultural references, connotations and nuances that can only come from years of school and university education. This is especially important in the legal and financial sectors, where nuance is everything.

Why ELF?

In a crowded marketplace of language service providers, every firm needs something special that makes it stand out from the crowd. At ELF we adopt a full-spectrum strategy to keep costs down whilst guaranteeing the highest quality:

We only work with specialists:

Your documents will only be translated by a native speaker with consolidated and proven expertise in their particular area. If we can’t guarantee this we’ll be honest with you.

We work business to business:

We do not actively seek work from private customers, and more than 98% of turnover is business-to-business. This helps save considerable amounts of time, and lets us pass on these savings to our customers.

We cut costs rigorously:

We don’t have expensive offices or administrative staff: the people you deal with are the ones who actually do the work.

Our stakeholder business model is based on reward for work, not profit:

Nobody involved in the company is there simply to take profits. The company is also structured in such a way that every person involved in the translation chain has a strong financial incentive to do the job properly.

We offer competitive and transparent pricing:

We strive to offer prices at the most competitive levels in the translation industry. If you want to set a fixed rate for all of your documents, we can do this. You also won’t find anything like supplementary charges for “more difficult” documents, and we won’t take advantage of you if you have no idea about industry standard pricing.

We are fast and flexible:

Whist quality translation takes time, if you are in a massive hurry we can deal with that too, even if you are looking for a rare language combination.

Flexibility in payments:

We can invoice and accept payment in any currency. However, we are able to offer our most competitive rates in our preferred currencies GBP, EUR and CHF.