A Sacramento Success Story

By James W. Cameron  Photo by Scott Duncan

Monica Nainsztein settles into a comfortable seat at Midtown’s Old Soul, a broad smile on her face.  The smile is well-earned – she’s just been named the 2011 Business Woman of the Year by the Sacramento Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. It’s an obvious selection. Through a combination of keen intelligence, indefatigable energy, and entrepreneurial know-how, Nainsztein has left her imprimatur on the region’s business community in just a few years.

A native of Argentina, Nainsztein came to Sacramento by way of Brazil, Israel and Florida, settling in with her Venezuelan husband, Alvaro Rodriguez, just ten years ago.  Since then, her formidable multi-lingual and marketing skills have enabled her establishment of SpanishOne Translations, a business sorely needed in a state and region where Hispanic/Latino societal influence grows every day. Establishing a small business – and maintaining it successfully – is a tough task, particularly in today’s economic climate, and doing so in a foreign country is especially difficult. With a glittering array of companies on her client list, Nainsztein makes it sound easy.

 “The business has been a natural extension of my previous work.  Languages have always been easy for me,” she explains.  “By the time I was ten years old, I had mastered Spanish, Portuguese and Hebrew and after a three month immersion course I jumped into an English-speaking classroom at school. Five  years later I was teaching English as a second language in Argentina.”  By age twenty one, Nainsztein had taught at four language academies, managed one of them, and was ready to put her entrepreneurial instinct and talent to the acid test.

But Nainsztein’s path in life hasn’t always been an easy one to walk.  A military junta in Argentina led to her mother’s exile and the family left for Brazil when she was just seven years of age.  “It was an unsettled time,” she says, “My parents divorced and we went to Brazil, then to Israel and Miami when I was quite young with all the personal and cultural adjustments that required. I grew up fast and had to make decisions a young person shouldn’t have to make.” Nainsztein returned to Argentina when it was safe to do so, completing high school and a three year curriculum in hotel and restaurant management.

In 1998, she met Alvaro Rodriguez in an online chat room, an electronic relationship that went on for nine months.  Rodriguez was living in Miami and Nainsztein says that “Our cellphone bills soon were costing more than the rent we paid.”  But the inventive and lovestruck Rodriguez had a solution.  “He said come to Florida and we’ll drive cross country and settle in California.  I thought it was crazy.  We hadn’t even met one another and I turned him down.” Crazy or not, the rest is history.  They met soon afterward and the relationship flourished.  “Alvaro had a job waiting in Sacramento,” Nainsztein says, “and one day he said to me, we have to get married Friday.  I thought it was another one of his impulsive thoughts but it turned out that if we didn’t get married, his work visa would expire and he’d have to leave the country.  I convinced him to wait until the following week and the second anniversary of our relationship and we were married then.”

Ensconced in Sacramento, the couple began carving out their new life.  Rodriguez, who Nainsztein fondly calls a “geek with social skills,” settled into a sales career as a color expert with an international printing software company.

Nainsztein’s SpanishOne Translations was born soon afterward and one of her first sales came from a cold call she and Rodriguez made to Hollywood pre-production studios.  Her sales pitch?  “How have you been successful without me?”

Since then, Nainsztein who is fluent in Spanish, Portuguese, English, French and Arabic, has built a company that offers translations, editing and proofreading services in over a hundred languages and utilizes a network of over two thousand professionals. Its unique quality lies in its ability to trans-create language so that the message remains true to the target language, avoiding incidents like the now famous Got Milk campaign where Hispanic/Latino customers were asked ‘Are You Lactating?’

The future? Nainsztein has been teaching weekly yoga classes to hispanic/Latino women at Oak Park’s Wellspring Women’s Center and plans to parlay that into a program that will provide health, education and empowerment  to Latina women through yoga, de-stressing techniques, proper diet and health awareness. SaludLatina, an October women’s conference in Sacramento, will launch the effort. “We will grow the program internationally, assisted by major corporate sponsors that understand the power of the Hispanic/Latino market,” Women are the heart of Latin society. They need help and I have much to give.”