OuiTranslate, a translation agency specialising in the luxury and beauty sectors
Luxury translation cannot be improvised. This conviction drove Clara to found OuiTranslate in Paris, after spending twenty years working for leading beauty houses. Karine, who now leads the agency, brings with her a wealth of managerial experience and an in-depth understanding of the codes of luxury. Whether in Paris or Geneva, OuiTranslate is a key partner for luxury houses that share the same high standards of linguistic and operational excellence.
Karine, OuiTranslate Manager
Karine never imagined she would pursue a career in translation. After graduating from business school, she set her sights on marketing for the luxury and beauty industries—and that is exactly where she began. After an internship at Elizabeth Arden, she spent four years at the Richemont Group in Geneva, working on the team that organised the Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie (now Watches & Wonders), which has since become the world’s leading watchmaking fair. Her work brought her into daily contact with the world’s greatest watchmaking houses.
It was her father, who ran a translation company, who changed the course of her career by asking her to step in for a project manager. She stayed on and specialised in translation for the luxury sector.
Very early on, she understood what made the difference when it came to translation projects: not simply translating accurately, but entrusting each text to the most specialised translator, whose style is most suited to the task. An outstanding cosmetics translator is not the right person for a fragrance press kit or a product training module.
Karine founded Kalliopé in 2006, before taking over OuiTranslate in Paris and establishing OuiTranslate Switzerland in Geneva. A French and Swiss national, Karine has set up the Geneva-based office to be closer to the luxury houses she supports on both sides of the border.
Clara, OuiTranslate Founder
For twenty years, Clara was on the other side of translation: the client’s side. As International Training Director for Lancôme, first in Miami and then in Paris, she would receive grammatically flawless texts that once in the field simply rang false. They were always missing the right word, the word a beauty consultant would use when talking to a client, or a trainer would slip in during a product launch. The word that always got away…
She could have made her peace with it, but instead she chose to turn it into a career. Her insight does not come from a translation perspective but from a brand perspective. Clara knows exactly what it’s like to be a marketing director sending an important document off for translation before rushing off to a meeting and then hearing nothing back, getting no updates and watching the deadline expire. It was in order to address this gap that she founded OuiTranslate in Paris, based on a simple promise: that luxury brands would get the linguistic expertise they deserved, with the level of service they had a right to expect.
Her first client came from Lancôme and it was the person who had taken over her role. A client who had moved to Guerlain then gave her a call. Another introduced her to Sisley. Word of mouth did the rest, as her contacts moved from one luxury house to another and brought her with them.
Clara speaks three languages and knows that sometimes everything comes down to just two or three terms, but these are terms that only a person with an intimate knowledge of the industry can pinpoint. In a press kit or training document, this is the term that must replace the overly literary word. And in the field, it is the term that sales teams will really use.
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