Christian Arno: Translating a web idea into sales of £5m

Christian Arno wanted a piece of the late nineties dotcom bubble. Fluent in three languages, he founded the translation website Lingo24 with a friend. It has steadily grown sales to £5m a year, and now has a hub in China and bases in seven countries.

Christian Arno, 32, had been teaching for just two weeks when he gave up. As part of his languages degree, he'd been sent to an Italian university to work as a teaching assistant. But "I really wasn't a very good teacher. I didn't have the patience." So he became a web entrepreneur instead. "It was 1999 and everyone was talking about the dotcom bubble." Rather than teach, he spent his placement year setting up an online translation service. He was fluent in French, Italian and English, and his contacts could help out with other languages. Jos Shepherd, a "techie friend", set up the site. The firm, TGV, was born.

Despite a "terrible-looking website", it got off to a good start. "In those days Yahoo dominated the search engines and for some reason we came up in their results." TGV provided Arno with "some beer money", but looming exams and a return to Oxford University meant he "didn't really try to grow the business". Upon graduating he faced a choice. "It was either: get a proper job' like my friends or try and make a success of the site."

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James McKeigue

James graduated from Keele University with a BA (Hons) in English literature and history, and has a certificate in journalism from the NCTJ. James has worked as a freelance journalist in various Latin American countries.He also had a spell at ITV, as welll as wring for Television Business International and covering the European equity markets for the Forbes.com London bureau. James has travelled extensively in emerging markets, reporting for international energy magazines such as Oil and Gas Investor, and institutional publications such as the Commonwealth Business Environment Report. He is currently the managing editor of LatAm INVESTOR, the UK's only Latin American finance magazine.