Language is a beautiful thing. It has the power to unite and divide. And understanding how to do the former and avoid the latter is so very important, today more than ever.
My name is Aaron Alder, and I live in Pleasant Grove, Utah. I founded Metafraze in 2003 because I love language and wanted to use my language skills to make the world a better place. I love how knowing different languages allows us to reshape our reality in a good way and understand things around us (e.g., the world) from different perspectives.
In college, I majored in German and after graduation, I spent a year learning Korean at the Defense Language Institute and working as a Korean linguist in the US Army. I also worked as a project manager at a translation agency, and then as a translation program manager at Intel. A colleague suggested that I start translating myself, and within a few months, I was making more money as a freelance translator than I was at Intel. I soon realized that translation is “heavy lifting” of the industry and that as much as I enjoyed the process, I also enjoyed project management.
That’s when I founded Metafraze. I am so glad that I did.
The years since have been filled with one exciting challenge after another, and I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished here. We’ve grown from one employee on our first day, to eight now, nearly two decades later.
Two decades!
And, we’ve spent a lot of that time giving back to the community by offering pro bono translation services to several charities in our area, among them Kids On The Move, Ronald McDonald House of Charities of the Intermountain Area, Project Read, Mobile Surgery International, A Child’s Hope Foundation and others.
It’s gratifying to know that we can give a hand up to our friends during some of the most challenging times of their lives.
I still make sure to immerse myself in the actual translation work, as I truly enjoy it, and more importantly. I don’t want to lose the skills I’ve developed after nearly a lifetime of practice. And I look forward to the day when I can travel again. I lived in Germany for two years as a young man and traveled there nearly a dozen times pre-pandemic. I have many close friends living mostly in the Berlin area. I love the German language, culture and people.
I also love interacting with people from around the world, observing their cultures, expanding my horizons, gaining fresh perspectives and using languages other than English whenever possible. There are some amazing people in the world, and I am lucky to interact with a few of them sometimes.
As a young boy, I never imagined that language would be such an important part of my life, but here we are. I can’t imagine doing anything else for work, ever.
If I’ve whetted your appetite even a little, I invite you to learn about open positions at Metafraze right here. We’re an amazing little company doing amazing big work, and we need on our growing team people who love language as much as we do.
