Cost in translation: Lingoport helps software firms go global.

• Author: Peterson, Eric
• Position: Attitude at altitude

Lanyon Inc., a Houston-based firm that produces and distributes online content for hotels, has pursued an international market for most of its eight-year existence but found many potential overseas customers resist doing business outside their native language.

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It follows that Lanyon's English-only user interface often proved a stumbling block.

"When people are entering information on a hotel, it's often an interpretive issue," said Philip Blahut, Lanyon's director of product development. "They might not understand the question asked of them."

The 25-employee Lanyon didn't have the resources to internationalize their user interface in-house, so last year they called in the experts: Boulder's Lingoport Inc., which specializes in software globalization.

"They took over the project and ran with it," Blahut said. "We basically just dropped off the source code."

Lingoport soon came back to Lanyon with a multicultural interface with French, German, Italian, Spanish and simplified Chinese templates.

Lingoport founder and CEO Adam Asnes said that the internationalization of software "is not just a bunch of bits and bytes. In some cases, you're changing the company radically. You're not just taking care of one customer--you're becoming a global company. So there are all kinds of investment in that as well as cultural change. You're not trying to throw a quick Band-Aid on your product."

Software globalization draws from both translation and technical spheres, added Asnes, pointing to Chinese and Japanese character sets as a prominent hint of a very different programming world. "You're never going to want to send a translator your source code--they'll break it," he quipped, quickly noting that cultural understanding is often equally important to good translation.

Since founding the now-thriving company in March 2001, Asnes has fostered Lingoport from a one-man act to its current 10-employee size without the catalyst of outside investment.

"The bubble had just burst in the tech area," he said. "I started talking...