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SIT alum finds success with language business in North Carolina
Thursday, January 13, 2005
By: Tristan Roberts
Staff of Language Resources
MAT grad Kathleen Quinby runs Language Resources
Kathleen Quinby, an MAT 13 who earned her master’s in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) from SIT in 1982, is in her twentieth year as the owner and director of Language Resources, a Greensboro, North Carolina business that offers interpreting, translating and teaching in 55 languages.
Before founding her company in 1984, Quinby volunteered for the Peace Corps in South Korea for two-and-a-half years in the late 1970s, where she taught university-level English classes. After working as an academic director for two years in Indiana, Quinby worked for the United Nations at a refugee camp in Bataan, Philippines, where she helped set up language training for Southeast Asian refugees.
While earning her master’s degree, Quinby said, “I ended up in North Carolina, finishing up my thesis at my brother’s house. Somebody said, you’ve worked with refugees, you should go to Greensboro,” where a number of the refugees she had worked with in the Philippines had landed for resettlement.
After two years working with the resettlement, Quinby decided to go back to teaching languages. Her business was largely in TESOL until 1995, when, she said “since NAFTA everybody needed translating. Business grew and grew,” said Quinby, and “now we do a lot of interpreting as well.”
Quinby’s interpreting clients are mainly institutions like hospitals, courts, doctor’s offices, businesses that operate or use equipment internationally, and lawyers, she said. Her thriving language teaching business includes intensive one-on-one instruction for companies doing business in North Carolina who have foreign executives working for them, Quinby said. “Often the instruction is for the family or spouse of the executive,” she said.
Although Quinby has moved beyond solely working with refugees, much of her work is more broadly involved with integrating the increasing diversity in the growing Greensboro area. A member of the SIT faculty who has worked with Quinby, Bonnie Mennell, said “Kathleen has been at the front of refugee resettlement, and her organization in a sense has seen and provided for the integration and valuing of all this new diversity in the Greensboro area.”
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