It all began back in 1997 when Alice Dulude, Tradusigne’s founder, made her debut as an ASL-LSQ interpreter for Dr. Patrick Boudreault, who was the owner of Communicasigne, founded in 1996. Dr. Boudreault’s firm was offering various sign language interpreting and translation services across Canada with a strong team of six ASL-LSQ interpreters. Alice stayed with the team until 2002, the year of the firm’s dissolution.
Despite its dissolution, Communicasigne’s clients still required their services, convincing Alice to take over their mission. One thing led to another and she expanded her network while teaching to hearing LSQ interpreting students in their sign language interpreting program at the University of Quebec at Montreal.
During the same period, she also took two training programs. The first training program was for Deaf interpreters, provided by Ontario Interpreting Services. The second one was in entrepreneurship, funded by the Ministère de l’Éducation, du Loisir et du Sport (Ministry of Education, Leisure and Sports) through their Women’s Program. The former was provided by the Association des femmes handicapées de Montréal (Association of Disabled Women of Montreal) as well as by Status of Women Canada.
TraduSigne is born
Following this training, Alice founded TraduSigne in 2011, a multi-service company that provides services in four languages – LSQ, ASL, French and English. In an effort to increase her credibility in the eyes of her clients and to share her knowledge with her team of interpreters, Alice decided to enroll in the Master’s in Interpreting program at Gallaudet University from which she graduated in 2017. TraduSigne is now in high demand and manages many contracts while delegating them to the twenty or so ASL-LSQ interpreters and sign language interpreters.
