In 2004, The Royal Opera House in Covent Garden removed Deborah Voigt from the role of Ariadne when she could not fit into one of the costumes.

Her decision was then to undergo a gastric bypass operation, helping her to lose 100lbs in weight.

Deborah has subsequently said “...god doesn’t necessarily put a beautiful voice into a beautiful body or a beautiful physique or a beautiful face...”  

Johan Botha is one of the world’s greatest dramatic tenors. He has appeared as Walther, the dashing young knight, in Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg and is besotted by the fair Eva.  It is reasonable to say that he is a very heavy man.

Stephan Zucker, Voice Historian, offers the story of a 1950s female opera singer who said, “when you look down and cannot see the ground then you know it’s time to reduce”.

What can the language provider learn from the plight of the heavy opera singer?

A year ago, we made the statement that the ‘personal’ touch is being lost by large translation providers in our industry because of their need to deploy standard solutions, to adhere to specific, internal processes and to control access to their personnel.  

We made that statement in recognition of the organisational weight being carried by some translation providers.  We realised that reductions would be sought by them, most likely from further streamlining and standardising their production environments.

However, this very action can cause the provider to lose sight of what is really important; the ability to deliver a personalised service to each and every client.

For the CEO, the term “...ground...” should be taken to mean “the needs of each client”, while “...it’s time to reduce” should be interpreted as the need to re-focus in order to deliver personalised service excellence to each client.

For eTeams, we would also add that personalised service excellence must be measurable in terms of ensuring that each client has a strong basis of trust in us through our commitment, proposals and our communications.

This year, we are delighted to confirm that the number of eTeams’ clients has grown.   

To our commercial and public sector clients, we offer our continued commitment to deliver personalised service excellence to each of you.  We also wish to say “thank you” again for choosing eTeams as your preferred language provider.

And yes, next year, we plan for further growth.

 ‘eTeams – translations you can trust’