Ten years ago an airplane landed us in Japan along with a PC fully loaded with the translations we had been doing in Italy until the day before. To set up our new office operation, which took only one day, we rushed to buy a PC display, a modem, a fax machine and a contract with an Internet provider. By then we hadn't established yet any contact with the local translation business: only a couple of direct industrial clients we had been working with from Italy. Our first and foremost activity was then searching for the main Japanese translation agencies; this took almost one week - we didn't expect there were so many in Japan - but it soon provided effective. Perhaps at that time there were not many Italian translators living in Japan, and this proved to be an ideal situation for us. Besides, our web site www.aliseo.com was already in place. Yahoo Japan was the only search engine worth using (Google was not well known or yet to appear in Japan), and any search done with keys such as "Japanese translation" and "Japanese Interpretation" ranked us in the very first position. Therefore we can say that we also owe our success to the Internet. Ah, those were the days! After eleven years of professional translation and interpretation work in Japan the competition has considerably intensified, and as a matter of fact almost all translators have their own web site in place now. Originally in Shibuya (Tokyo), then Myorenji (Yokohama) and then again Yokohama near the famous Sakuragi-cho, in the Minato Mirai area with a beautiful view on the famous Landmark, our work has been developing considerably: from the single PC that we brought as hand luggage from Italy, to a network of PCs with a complete set of continuously updated software and dozens of faithful clients to which new ones keep adding. However in 2003 we decided to buy a house sufficiently far away from the big cities; we are living now in the beautiful Izu Kogen, in the Shizuoka Prefecture, where green, blue, clean air and exquisite food are our new translation companions.

A new page has been added to our web site. It is about Izu Kogen in the Shizuoka Prefecture, where we moved in 2004. A paradise with abundance of sea, mountains and thermal water were we believe anybody would like to live. A paradise far from the large city's chaos and noise which inspires more creativity, but close enough to Tokyo from where we can return in the same day when we go for interpretation assignments. Finally, a place which greatly resembles our beloved Liguria, the Italian region we love most.

Our web site is now totally CSS-built. This may not be important for our visitors, but the fact that it is now faster to download makes visiting the site a more pleasant experience. Graphics and layout have changed too, resulting in a site that is more appealing and pleasant to visit.

We usually determine our translation rates based on the precise calculation of the source document's words (Italian or English source texts) or characters (Japanese source texts). This is an easy (automatic) operation with nowadays editing software, provided that the source document is available as an editable file. Doing so allows us to provide clients with a precise and firm translation quote. However, should the source document be available only as a printout, or more in general in a format that does not allow to automatically calculate the number of words, we can only provide clients with a rough cost estimate and then invoice based on the actual target word/character count. Please therefore understand this principle when requesting a translation job.