A Technical Translation Company That Turned Down Everything Else

Why we built a technical translation company on purpose

Techniwords started in 2011 in the Houston area, where two of our founding linguists had spent years producing and localizing industrial documentation for the energy sector. They kept seeing the same failure: a plant would send an operator manual or a set of safety procedures to a general translation agency, and the file that came back read fine to a project manager and wrong to every engineer who opened it. A "valve" became a "faucet." Torque values survived, but their units did not. The agencies were staffed with talented generalists who had simply never stood on a plant floor.

The founding decision was to refuse the work most agencies chase. We do not translate advertising, fiction, subtitles, or corporate communications. Turning down that revenue is what lets us hold every linguist in our network to a double standard: proven language skill and verifiable technical background. When a client sends us a lockout/tagout procedure, the person translating it has written, maintained, or worked under documents like it.

How the company is structured

We run a deliberately small core team out of Texas: project managers, a terminology lead, and quality reviewers. Around that core sits a vetted network of certified translators, most of them degreed engineers or former industry professionals, each assigned by sector before language pair. Eight of them are presented by name on our technical translators page, from Miguel Ferrer on Spanish machinery documentation to Yuko Tanaka on Japanese patents, because we think you should know who is actually translating your files.

Every project, without exception, goes through translation plus independent revision by a second linguist. That TEP workflow, along with documented linguist qualifications and full traceability, is how we maintain an ISO 17100-compliant quality process. We are members of the American Translators Association and of GALA, the Globalization and Localization Association. We do not claim certifications we do not hold, and we will tell you plainly what "ISO 17100-compliant" means versus a third-party audit.

What fifteen years of technical work looks like

We avoid vanity metrics, but some numbers describe the shape of the company honestly. Since 2011 we have translated several million words of technical content: user manuals, SDS libraries, engineering drawings, commissioning dossiers, IFUs, and software strings. We work in more than 60 languages, with Spanish, German, Chinese, French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Italian carrying the heaviest volume. Our clients are mostly manufacturing, energy, aerospace, and medical device companies, from family-owned machine shops to publicly traded operators. You will find anonymized, quantified examples in our case studies; NDAs prevent us from naming anyone, and we consider that a feature.

• 2011 · Techniwords founded in the Houston area by linguists from industrial documentation teams.
• 2014 · First large energy-sector accounts; recurring SDS and procedure programs for Gulf Coast operators.
• 2017 · Quality workflow formally structured around ISO 17100: documented linguist competences, mandatory second-linguist revision, project traceability.
• 2020 · Growth in medical device and e-learning translation as clients moved training and IFU programs online.
• 2023 · Launch of our client terminology program: locked termbases built and validated before large projects start.
• 2026 · Coverage passes 60 languages, delivered fully remotely to clients in every US state.

What we commit to on every project

Buyers comparing agencies mostly receive adjectives. Here is our half of the agreement written in terms you can check against a delivered file.

Commitment	How it shows up in your project
Sector before language	Your file is assigned to a linguist who knows the equipment or the regulation first, and who happens to work in your pair second.
Native target speakers only	Every translator works into the language they grew up speaking, whatever direction the source runs.
A second linguist on everything	Independent revision is built into the base rate. It is never an option you can remove to save money, because removing it is where errors survive.
Terminology fixed up front	On projects above roughly 10,000 words, a termbase is validated with you before translation starts rather than argued about at delivery.
Realistic throughput	We schedule around 2,000 to 2,500 words per translator per day and tell you when a deadline forces a team split.
Corrections without invoices	If a delivered segment is wrong, we fix it, log the cause, and update the memory and glossary so it cannot repeat on your next release.

Those commitments are the same for a 900-word datasheet and a 400,000-word documentation set. The scale of the team changes; the sequence does not.

What we deliberately do not do

A company is defined as much by its refusals as by its services. Three of ours matter to buyers:

• No raw machine output sold as human translation. Machine translation with post-editing exists in our toolbox, and when it fits a project we say so on the quote, priced as what it is. It is never passed off as the work of a specialist translator.
• No generalists on technical files. If we cannot staff a project with a sector-matched linguist, we decline it and say why, rather than assign whoever is free.
• No content outside our lane. Marketing transcreation and literary translation are real crafts. They are somebody else's craft.

The values that survive contact with a deadline

Plenty of agencies publish values. Ours are the specific behaviors clients can hold us to. Precision means numbers, units, part references, and normative citations are checked by a second linguist and by automated QA on every delivery; the mechanics are laid out step by step in how our process works. Honesty about deadlines means we quote dates we can meet. When a 40,000-word request arrives on a Friday with a Monday deadline, we explain what is achievable and what the trade-offs are, instead of promising and slipping. Confidentiality means NDAs from first contact on request, encrypted file handling, and access limited to the linguists on your project.

That posture comes from where we sit. Being anchored in Houston's industrial corridor keeps us close to refineries, fabricators, and EPC firms whose documentation carries real safety and compliance weight. It is hard to be casual about a translated confined-space procedure when your neighbors are the people who will follow it.

Who we serve, and how to work with us

Our typical contact is an EHS manager who needs a Spanish SDS library before an audit, a documentation manager shipping a machine to three countries, or a project engineer receiving supplier files in German or Chinese. Browse the industries we specialize in or the document types we handle daily to see whether your work matches ours. If it does, send us the files: you will get an itemized quote within one business hour, listing translation, revision, and any DTP as separate lines. If it does not match, we will say so in the same hour and, when we can, point you to someone better suited.