This Founder Had a Lot to Learn When She Moved to the U.S. She Turned It Into a Translation Business

This Founder Had a Lot to Learn When She Moved to the U.S. She Turned It Into a Translation Business

Elisabete Miranda

 Photograph by Melody Timothee

When Elisabete Miranda immigrated to the United States from Brazil in 1994, she learned how a life's experience can get lost in translation. In Brazil, she'd been a respected serial entrepreneur and vice president of her local chamber of commerce. In the U.S., she felt like one more Latin American woman who didn't speak the language. "When you move to another country, it's like you become a stupid person," she says with a laugh, recalling her first days in the States. "You have to suck it up and do what you need to do."

What Miranda needed to do, she believed, wasn't just to learn English, but also to turn translation into a business. She teamed up with her sister-in-law, Edna Ditaranto, a professional translator, who at the time was doing