About us

It all starts with passion: passion for the written word, and an awareness that translating a text into another language is the process of seeing another culture through one’s own eyes.

Scriptum was founded in 1986 by Italian translators specializing in European literature and Asian languages, and two English literature lecturers from the La Sapienza University in Rome.

The company soon built up a reputation in the translation industry for its expertise in the humanities (literature, philosophy, non-fiction, art and linguistics). It acquired clients from the art world and publishing, film-making and entertainment, and built up a network of expert translators to cover all of the main European and non-European language combinations.

Scriptum’s strengths are its ability to work to challenging deadlines across multiple languages; its insistence on using only mother tongue translators; and a guarantee that every job is managed by a project leader to ensure output quality.

Over the years, Scriptum has expanded the range of services it offers to include writing and editing, editorial services, coordinating major publishing ventures in multiple languages, layout in QuarkXPress and InDesign, web site design and translation, and multimedia publishing.