Our community

We love helping charities and sponsor the annual Polar Bear Plunge which has raised over £25,000 to date.

Director Clare Suttie manages the St Albans Postboxes, bringing woolly magic to St Albans every Christmas – and raising over £115 000 for charities to date.

Clare also set up Exmouth Postboxes, which raises funds for Hospiscare every summer.

As a company (and individuals) we regularly support a number of charities.

A common interest is good food and good coffee – thank you George Street Canteen and L’Italiana.

We also love Toast for coffee and Per Tutti is another favourite spot for a bite to eat.

Atlas Translations is active in the local and national business community – meet us at St Albans Businesses Jelly, at St Albans and District Chamber of Commerce events, or perhaps the next ITI Conference.

So to give you a snapshot; in 2016 our director Clare sent her husband to the North Pole. Not randomly, but to raise money for: Cancer Research UK, Rennie Grove Hospice Care, Earthworks St Albans and the UK Antarctic Heritage Trust. Yes, it was Mr. Clare who trekked to the North Pole. Fair point, but it was Clare who stayed home to look after their three children and run Atlas.

Before he left, Clare and Mr. Clare  – or  ‘Ed’ – organised a ball; the Snow and Ice Ball where many of you came along and supported the chosen charities. Thank you. We couldn’t have done it without you. Also before he left, (yes, there’s more), on 01 January 2016 there was the Polar Bear Plunge organised by Clare, AKA the Polar PA. With some admin support from me, Anna, who shall be known as ‘The Polar Plunge PA’s PA’ or ‘Pee-pee Pa-pa’ for short. This gave people from across Hertfordshire, London and beyond, the chance to jump into icy waters to raise money for charity. What a wonderful, chilly yet warm spirited, way to start the year.

The Plunge was such a success that it ran again on 01 January 2017 and 01 January 2018. Raising even more money for great causes; and it happened again on 01 January 2019, and in 2020 – and it’s still going, run by wonderful Earthworks St Albans.

Further afield, we support a child in Africa through WorldVision. Her name is Lightness Sambuya and we ensure she receives educational support as well as financial support to give her a better start in life.

We are dedicated to supporting local businesses. Even down to the coffee shop where we buy our Friday coffee-treats (courtesy of Atlas – thanks Clare). It’s not part of a huge conglomerate chain but a small coffee-shop called George Street Canteen They are brilliant and their coffee is great as are their cakes….  They have very kindly donated free cakes and coffee for our charity event, Breast Tea Ever.

We ran a Bra Bank for many years and are delighted now to signpost you to take all your unwanted bras to, appropriately enough, a bra shop! Gwendolen is a specialist lingerie and swimwear boutique situated at 6 Upper Dagnall Street AL3 5EA in the heart of St Albans. They will accept your bras into the bra bank there.

We are dedicated to recycling. Not so easy here in our office, so we carry home our plastic milk bottles (from our gallons of tea). We have a set of re-useable coffee cups (thank you George St Canteen). And we recyle our pizza boxes (L’Italiana, a local restaurant). We love Pizza Friday. Makes a change from our packed lunches. And it’s the only restaurant our Italian Project Managers love. Good enough endorsement for me!  So we trundle home loaded down with recycling.

Ryman are the lucky recipients of our used printer cartridges, though we are well on the way to being a paperless office.

Through our real work offering and delivering translation work internationally we are active in the local business community. While we speak the world’s languages, we understand the importance of our local communities and charities. We also recognise that all this work would not be possible without our incredible team of linguists who work for us. We host events twice a year that allows us to say a big, heartfelt thank you to them.

In a time of the Internet, email, working-from-home and even phone-calls, it’s easy to forget there is a person attached to a name. We are keen to have face-to-face contact with all who work for Atlas. Good relationships are needed for the high quality of work we deliver. Without these incredible language experts there would be no human and therefore real, translation. This is an invaluable element of the service we offer.

There is much written about translation software and whether ‘human-translation’ is needed anymore. By the way, ‘human-translation’ means people who are highly qualified language experts who don’t just change one word for another. They understand its context, respect the cultural sensitivities and find a new, yet beautiful and succinct way of saying the same thing in an alternate language. Translation isn’t binary; it isn’t a two dimensional science or basic algebra. X doesn’t always equal X.  It’s far greater than that. There are thousands of ways to say the same things and our vast team of translators find the most appropriate words. Translating is more like art. Or poetry.

To show our appreciation for this, we like our translators to join us regularly and enjoy fine food, drink and conversation that isn’t necessarily about work.  After these events, we sometimes have left-over food. We deliver this food to local homeless centres so nothing is wasted. Information on events and meeting us can be found here on the Atlas Translations website.

Although we aren’t a family-run business, we would never regard each other as just colleagues. We are supportive of one another at different stages of life, parenting, career development and return-to-work. We offer part-time, flexi-working, a 4-day working week, and the option to work from home enabling us to spend time with our families. And pets!  We are very proud to be part of this wonderful team of incredible people.

You can see us in this promotional video.