Let’s take stock and recap 2021

Useless preamble with embedded rant that you can also skip

In the early days of the year, I find my inbox flooded with resolutions for 2022 and retrospectives of the past year. It seems that for all the companies and professionals I follow, 2021 was a fantastic year.

In fact, it seems like it’s always all great: remarkable achievements, resounding successes, splendid smiles. Everything is awesome, as they sang in that movie.

It is the distorted lens through which a certain type of communication passes, whereby problems always become “challenges”, crises are always harbingers of “opportunities”, losses are just the result of “downshifting”, and so on.

It’s not even a question of optimism or pessimism, it’s just the programmatic intent to launch - always and in any case - positive messages, without having the courage (or the decency, in some cases) to call things by their own name.

Please note: I’m not saying it’s wrong or that it doesn’t bring results, quite the contrary. If it is the communication style followed by so many, there will be a reason.

This style provokes two feelings in me:

1. on the one hand, a deep and malignant envy of all these professionals and companies that achieve excellence quickly, that do not know discouragement or disappointment;
2. on the other, an equally deep boredom, because these messages do not give me useful information, do not create empathy, do not deepen concepts. They are the non-martial equivalent of awarding honors. Only here the medals are posted by the medalist himself.

Now, this would make more sense if I didn’t decide to jump on the same bandwagon myself (I’ve never claimed to be a consistent person). So let’s try to make a recap of 2021 for Qabiria, but maybe leave the medals in their cases...

A year of transition

The year 2021 was a transitional year for Qabiria, without infamy or praise. I don’t have the final financials in hand yet, but I can already say that the bottom line was similar to 2020, with revenue more or less stable, but still a bit off from 2019, our best year.

A free tool for those who need to buy translations

Continuing our tradition of offering useful tools to customers, in January 2021 we launched a module to easily calculate how long it takes to translate a document.

We called it the Qalculator. You can find the detailed explanation in the article “[How long does it take to translate a document?] (/resources/blogs/how-long-does-it-take-to-translate-a-document)”.

New website and new services

This novelty was part of the larger project of redesigning of our website.

At the same time as the site, we have also launched two new service lines: those related to multilingual sites (consulting, SEO and web development services) and those related to writing (content editing, business writing, copywriting, UX writing).

Our favorite son: our blog

In 2021 we managed to publish on the Qabiria blog as many as 45 articles, including new publications and updates of articles already proposed.

I am very pleased with this result, but I must admit: it’s frustrating to see that many of these articles go unnoticed when we share them on social media, while a vaguely controversial comment attracts dozens of likes and thousands of views (see this linkedIn post).

These are the notorious dynamics of social media, in which shouting always wins out over depth of analysis, dynamics that I struggle to understand. It’s no coincidence that one of our 2022 goals is to find a collaborator to help us get the content out there the way it deserves.

And yes, I know that videos and podcasts now pull much more than in-depth articles. But what are you going to do with it? I’m an old-fashioned 50-something, I like to read and - naively - I think everyone does.

Among the 45 posts that garnered the most interest were:

• How to translate a site made with WordPress
• how to write a user manual
• Italian SMEs in the globalised world(in Italian only)
• What is readability

Customers come...

In conjunction with the launch of the new services, we collaborated on the development of two websites, that of our colleague Francesca Soldani and that of a pool of nautical professionals operating under the name of YachtProHub.

The first one served us to put into practice our knowledge of multilingual Squarespace, which we have talked about extensively in the article “Definitive guide to creating a multilingual Squarespace site”, while for YachtProHub the intervention was more strategic and consulting related to information architecture.

During the year we were contacted by some e-learning experts who needed to translate their courses developed in Moodle.

In one case we took care of the conversion and translation (following the steps explained in the article “How to translate a Moodle course in 2021”), while in the other we provided external advice on the process.

The unexpected news of 2021 was the start of a business relationship with a large digital marketing company. The company contacted us to subtitle in Italian, Spanish and Portuguese videos of influencers and youtubers, as part of a very ambitious project. We have had to set up several dedicated teams and - for now - everything is proceeding at a good pace, with excellent growth prospects.

...customers go

Otherwise, in 2021 we continued to translate for Smartling, reaching about 1.9 million words from English to Italian, solidifying us as the preferred provider for this language combination.

Among the many projects we tackled, we continued our collaboration with Bata Group, specifically for their AW LAB e-commerce. In addition, we have translated other scientific texts requested by the Japanese university that we have been serving for a few years, rather complicated projects where we have been able to apply our layout skills in LaTeX.

We then continued to provide translation and proofreading to a number of agencies, as well as to institutions and private companies with whom we have worked for years.

Co-workers and interns, athletes...or not

During the year we welcomed as many as 5 interns, 2 in-person and 3 remotely.

One of them, Mattia Nervegna, continued the tradition of us hosting people with strong ties in the sports world. After having a champion ice hockey player (Carlota Alvarado) and a volleyball and beach volleyball player of Primera División (Paolo Frassine, who oversaw some business development campaigns and wrote various articles for the blog), this time it was the turn of a former basketball player and current promise of padel.

Mattia came to Badalona not only to learn the trade of translator at Qabiria, but also to perfect his game, training daily at Padel Indoor Mataró, a school that has trained several World Padel Tour players.

Webinars and courses past and... future

Playful parenthesis aside, in 2021 we continued our training activities for translators and companies.

In April, we held two webinars entitled “Checking the quality of translations with free, low-cost or open source tools” for the Lombardy section of AITI, the Italian Association of Translators and Interpreters, then repeated in November for AITI Lazio.

For STL Formazione in Pisa, we did not create any new courses this year, but we did deliver some on demand through their online platform.

For the ISTRAD in Seville, we held a webinar on web localization in October, two webinars on tools for translators in November, and finally continued teaching in the one-year specialization course on Translation and Marketing.

Finally, with the European School of Translation in Rome, in late 2021 we began collaborating on the development of a new course that we will be launching soon, a free “trailer” of which is available entitled “[How to Set Translation Rates]”(https://corsi.e-schooloftranslation.org/p/come-stabilire-le-tariffe-di-traduzione).

The American Dream

In order to provide better service to American clients and to find new ones, we opened a U.S. representation, in Atlanta, on July 12, relying on an on-site associate. The American market is very large, but also difficult to penetrate. We hope that the commercial efforts of these months will pay off in 2022.

To sum up

To sum up, as I hope is evident from this report, we didn’t sit on our hands this year either. After a difficult 2020 in so many ways and a transitional 2021, we hope that 2022 will allow us to realize our plans for consolidation and growth.

We have a few new things in store that we are working on. Keep following us so you don’t miss them. And if you have any suggestions or comments, please don’t hesitate: the comments section is at your disposal.

And happy new year from all of us.