During the decade of the 1980s, Brazil imposed a total restriction on imports in the computer market, which gave rise to a domestic industry in this area. Responding to the industry’s demand for technical writers, our company, the brain child of an electrical engineer and a systems analyst, was founded to provide the services of creating user manuals for information technology products.

One day, I was at the print shop to deal with the printing of a manual, and the manager said to me:

− Our shop prints the manuals for HP calculators. They asked me if we could also translate these manuals. Do you guys do that?

Well, we were technical writers. Translating manuals would be something similar to writing them, so I said we did. So we began translating HP calculator manuals.

This was in 1986. Let’s take a look at what has transpired between HP and us since then:

• Founded in 1939, HP grew through direct corporate sales of products such as laboratory instruments, plotters and large computers. In the decade of the 1970s, they turned their attention to the consumer market with calculators that became icons (like the legendary HP 12C, still used by accountants to this day). In 1990, it began to merge with or acquire other firms including giants such as Compaq and Palm, adding to its portfolio consumer products such as microcomputers, personal printers and scanners. Through mergers with EDS and 3Com, it also made a strong entrance into the corporate software market. By the end of the decade of 2010, HP had reached ninth place on the Fortune 500 list.

In Brazil, in order to sell its calculators in a market that was closed to imports in the 1980s, HP formed an alliance with the Brazilian company Edisa. During the 90s, with the opening of the market, HP officially entered the Brazilian market with its consumer products.

With operations in dozens of countries, by the 1990s the volume of translation required by HP became enormous, which led them to create their own translation agency, ACG (Applications and Contents Globalization Group). This new entity, in addition to meeting HPs internal demand, also began to provide services for important outside clients such as Agilent, Siemens and Microsoft. Today, ACG is spread over several countries, and its project management is concentrated in China.

In 2015, HP was split into 3 companies: HP Inc, HP Enterprise and DXC Corporation. ACG remained active, as a part of DXC.

• Our company, initially a technical writing agency, has also radically transformed itself over these 34 years. With the opening of the Brazilian Market in 1990, most of the domestic information technology companies became representatives for global manufacturers, reducing the demand for technical writers to virtually nothing and increasing the demand for translation. At this point, our company, which had already been providing translation services to HP and other clients, officially became a translation agency. Working initially with English and Portuguese, we incorporated Spanish into our mix in 2003, at which time we changed our name to Latinlanguages.

So, it is fair to say that our path has run parallel to that of HP in Brazil. We entered the translation field in 1986, to provide service to this company, which was still operating through the Brazilian firm Edisa. When HP assumed its own identity in this country, we were already one of their suppliers, as we still are to this day. Certainly, we must be HP’s oldest supplier in Brazil.

Since 1990, there hasn’t been a single month without a service request from this client. Last year (2019), we received approximately 5000 service orders from ACG (an average of 19 per workday). Our translations to Portuguese and Spanish are incorporated into HP products sold in Brazil, Latin America, Spain and the United States, as well as those of other ACG clients such as Siemens, Agilent and Microsoft.

Here’s to 34 more years!

Marcos Chiquetto

Founder and director – LatinLanguages

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