Webxample LLC.

• Author: Peterson, Eric
• Position: Company overview

INITIAL LIGHTBULB

After coming to Colorado from his native Venezuela in the mid-1980s, Ignacio Jimenez worked in his family's import-export business and then founded TranslationLinks, a multilingual services firm, in 1993. With a global network of more than 1,000 translators, the company has established itself as a specialist in technical translation for companies like Sun Microsystems and AstraZeneca.

With the Internet growing increasingly important in the corporate world, Jimenez realized he needed to diversify his services to meet the market demand. "We needed technology to add to (translation) to reach other markets," he explained. So he teamed with software engineer Emilio Navarro, whom he'd worked with throughout the 1990s, to spin off a separate tech-services firm in WebXample.

With Jimenez serving as CEO and Navarro as CTO, the five-employee WebXample has developed several products while also offering Web and software development services.

Said Navarro: "The niche we have focused on is the multilingual market."

IN A NUTSHELL

WebXample's flagship service is TranslationMail, a system that allows companies to translate e-mail into any language via an online portal, with a human-element assist from sister company TranslationLinks' worldwide translator network. Because translators carry mobile technology, Jimenez said it usually takes only five to 10 minutes for a message sent by a client to be translated into the target language and sent to its final recipient.

The entire process is secure and seamless, Navarro added. "The recipient will never know it came from us," he said. "The translator will never know who it is going to and where it is coming from, and the message is encrypted."

TranslationMail's pricing is based on the popularity of the language (Spanish is relatively inexpensive, Asian tongues are pricier) and the number of characters in the message. To this end, translators are well versed in abbreviating common words and phrases in both the source and target languages.

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WebXample's second key offering is customized online proficiency examinations, or OPEs, that allow an...