Chicago, since 2009 · Translation as a Service + applied AI

Two practices.
One engineering team.

For sixteen years Linguanational has handled language for Chicago institutions that cannot afford a mistake. Then we built the AI platform that does the work — and now we build systems like it for other organizations too.

55.8M
Words processed

in production, to date

153
Language pairs

104 target languages

2,005h
Audio transcribed

multi-speaker included

98.0%
Automated QA pass rate

12 checks on every job

10.3 min
Median turnaround

per job, end to end

Live from the platform we operaterefreshed every 60s

What we do

Buy the outcome, or buy the system that produces it.

Most organizations come to us for one and discover they needed the other. The two practices share the same engineers, the same quality bar, and the same contract.

Practice one

Translation as a Service

Software stopped being something you buy in a box. Translation is going the same way. Same linguists, same review, same sixteen years of institutional work — delivered as a service you plug into instead of a project you re-quote every time.

  • Translation & certified translation
  • Website & software localization
  • Interpreting
  • Audiovisual & media
  • Education & eLearning
  • Human review & linguistic QA
See how TaaS works

Practice two

AI solutions

Document automation, OCR, speech, multilingual systems and the evaluation harnesses that prove they work — built for your data and deployed where your data is allowed to live.

  • Document & workflow automation
  • Document intelligence & OCR
  • Multilingual AI systems
  • Speech & audio AI
  • Evaluation & quality harnesses
  • Private & on-premise deployment
  • Integration, APIs & webhooks
See AI solutions

Translation as a Service

If you buy translation from us today, nothing you rely on is going away.

How the model works

You already know this model

Software stopped being something you bought in a box and became something you subscribe to. Translation is going the same way — and we have already built the version of it that works.

The service does not change. The delivery does.

The same linguists, the same terminology, the same review. What changes is that it arrives through an API, a portal or your own systems instead of a quote and a purchase order every time.

Capacity you do not have to schedule

No re-quoting for each batch, no waiting for a vendor to have availability. Volume moves up and down and the service absorbs it.

Priced like a service, not a project

Per word, per hour or committed volume — whichever your procurement office needs. Predictable enough to budget a year out.

Why believe the AI claim

We are not integrating someone else's AI. We run our own.

Any firm can put “AI-powered” on a slide. Very few can show you a system that has been in production for years, under real deadlines, with quality measured rather than asserted.

The numbers on this page come out of the platform we operate with Flix Translations Group LLC. They update on their own. If a number looks bad one week, it stays on the page.
  • Our own pipelines, our own infrastructure, our own quality gates
  • 12 automated QA checks on every single job, not on a sample
  • Human review scored on a formal error typology with severity weighting
  • Deployable in your environment when the data cannot leave it
How the platform works

Production volume by file type

  • audio5,921 jobs · 19,187,455 words
  • pdf602 jobs · 17,208,161 words
  • rtf475 jobs · 2,893,107 words
  • docx461 jobs · 1,884,443 words
  • batch197 jobs · 917,147 words
  • txlf488 jobs · 473,453 words
  • sdlxliff206 jobs · 306,976 words
  • mqxliff66 jobs · 101,647 words
  • xml67 jobs · 15,624 words
  • pptx5 jobs · 6,597 words

Live production counters from the platform Linguanational operates with Flix Translations Group LLC. Refreshed every 60 seconds.

Who we work with

Four sectors where language and automation are the same problem.

Each one has a compliance clock, a multilingual population and a back office still moving documents by hand. We work on both halves at once.

Client work

Chicago Public Schools

Family communications for a district of 400,000 students

One of the largest school districts in the United States — over 600 schools — where families arrive from dozens of language backgrounds and every notice has to reach all of them.

Read the case study
600+
schools served by the district
~400K
students in the district

Working with an institution this size means insurance, records handling and audit expectations are already routine for us — which is usually the part that stalls an AI vendor in procurement.

Procurement package

Why Linguanational

What a Chicago AI shop usually can't say.

We operate an AI platform, we don't resell one

Most firms pitching AI in Chicago are integrating somebody else's API. We run our own production system: our own pipelines, our own infrastructure, our own quality gates. The numbers on this page come out of it.

We measure quality instead of asserting it

Every job runs through a 12-step automated QA chain, and human review is scored on a formal error typology. When we say a system works, we can show you the evaluation set it works on.

We already clear institutional procurement

Working with a district the size of Chicago Public Schools means insurance, records handling, background requirements and audit expectations are not new to us.

Language is the hard version of the problem

A team that can keep a Trados tag pair intact across 101 target languages can handle your invoice extraction. The reverse is rarely true.

Chicago, since 2009

Same city, same time zone, sixteen years of institutional clients here. You can meet the people who will do the work.

Your data can stay where it is

Open-weight models deployed in your environment when the material cannot leave it — which is where most public-sector and healthcare AI projects actually get stuck.

How an engagement runs

Two weeks to know whether this is worth building.

Nobody should sign a six-figure AI project on a demo. We start with a fixed-fee sprint on your real data and give you a plan you can take to procurement — including the recommendation not to proceed, when that is the honest answer.
01

Discovery sprint

2 weeks · fixed fee

We work on your real data, not a demo set. You get a written technical plan, a working prototype of the riskiest part, and a build estimate you can take to procurement. If the answer is that AI is the wrong tool here, we write that down too.

  • Technical plan
  • Prototype on your data
  • Fixed build estimate
02

Build

6–12 weeks typical

Fixed scope, milestone billing, a demo every two weeks. We build against the evaluation harness from day one, so 'done' is a measurement and not a feeling. Deployed to your infrastructure or ours.

  • Working system in your environment
  • Evaluation harness + baseline
  • Documentation and handover
03

Run

Ongoing or handover

Either we operate it under an SLA with monitoring and on-call, or your team takes it and we stay available for the first two quarters. Both are priced up front. No surprise managed-service lock-in.

  • SLA-backed operation
  • Monitoring & alerting
  • Or clean handover

Where we are

A Chicago company, working on Chicago's problems.

Janie Markos founded Linguanational here in 2009. In 2024 we partnered with Flix Translations Group LLC, which brought the engineering team and the platform. Same city, same office, considerably more capability.

Chicago is a city where more than a hundred languages are spoken in the public schools alone. That is not a side constraint on the technology work here — it is the technology work.
About the company

“The hardest problems in applied AI are the ones where being almost right is worse than being obviously wrong.”

A benefits letter, a court filing, a discharge instruction, a safety procedure. That is the category we have worked in since 2009, and it is why we build evaluation before we build features.

Next step

Tell us what is taking too long.

A translation program that cannot keep up, an archive nobody can search, a back office retyping PDFs. Start with the bottleneck and we will tell you honestly whether AI is the right tool for it.