Dispute, suit leave Nashuan's book in limbo.

Nataly Kelly started out to write a book that would "give some visibility to the invisible person on the other end of the telephone," a book about the telephone interpreting industry, which, she said, "has kind of exploded."

Instead, the book itself--"Telephone Interpreting: A Comprehensive Guide to the Profession"--has kind of exploded, embroiled in a controversy that cost her a $120,000-a-year job working out of her Nashua home. While the book can still be pre-ordered on Amazon.com for roughly $100 a copy, its distribution was held up just weeks before its planned May 18 publication date because of a dispute between Kelly and her former employer that is now being fought out in a federal lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Concord.

Kelly said she is "extremely disheartened" by the turn of events, yet when she talks about the OPI (over-the-phone interpretation) industry that she has been involved in for so many years, her voice becomes very animated.

It's an industry, she said, that started out as part of the telemarketing industry to sell phone services to those who primarily converse in another language--estimated to be some 47 million people in the United States--and now has become a ubiquitous part of service delivery--from medical to insurance to banking to computer technical services.

Kelly said interpretation--and more recently telephone interpretation--is the fastest-growing field in the commercial world. One estimate pegs the market at $1 billion, with only a fifth being served at the moment.

Kelly got her start out of school in the mid-1990s interpreting conferences in Ecuador and courts in Latin America, but she eventually became involved in telephone interpretation as an employee, a consultant and even started her own business. The field, which was once dominated by one company, has become competitive, with different firms specializing in different fields.

No one has ever wrote a book about this new industry, and Kelly said she wanted to bring it to the world's attention.

That's about as much as Kelly would say about the book. Her attorney, Pamela Smith of Newton, Mass., advised her not to talk about when and how she wrote the book, because that is at the heart of the lawsuit against NetworkOmni, her former employer, and the California company's executive vice president, Manuel Mendoza, who she says were trying to steal her work.

According to the suit, NetworkOmni managed to stop the book's publication by telling the British publishers--Multimedia Matters--that it was a work for hire and contained confidential and proprietary information.

(NetworkOmni declined comment, because the matter is in litigation.)

In an affidavit for the lawsuit, Kelly said that NetworkOmni assured her--both orally and in writing, when being hired and during her employment--that it had no problem with her working on the book apart from her job.

Most of the book, she said in the affidavit, had been written before she began working there.

"Telephone Interpreting: A Comprehensive Guide to the Profession" was to be published as part of the "Professional Interpretation in the Real World" series. Kelly was involved in a number of pre-release publicity activities, including an interview with Business Week magazine. It was hyped as the first major book to cover telephone interpreting.

Kelly, who started as a court interpreter, landed a job at AT&T as a senior language specialist for its language line service. She freelanced and then started her own company--LogiLing Inc. It was during this time that she developed her book and entered negotiations with her publisher, which she explained to NetworkOmni CEO George Ulmer and Mendoza upon being hired in April 2005 as senior product development manager, based out of her Nashua home.

She even put it in writing in May of 2005 to Ulmer that she had already written a good deal of it, "so rest assured that it in no way will conflict with my job."

At first, Kelly said, the company was indifferent to the book, putting off an offer to feature the company's interpreters on the covers until it did a detailed review. She sent a draft of the book out of "courtesy" for that purpose, though she said she made sure to put the symbol indicating that she had the copyright on every page.

In late 2006, Kelly began to complain about "inappropriate and discriminatory behavior" by Mendoza and others. In retaliation, Mendoza began to claim that "my book was the property of NetworkOmni."

When Kelly pressed her complaints, Ulster allegedly defended Mendoza by saying that he felt "castrated" by Kelly's "outstanding performance" and was acting "macho" and like a "wounded animal," she wrote in her affidavit. Then, she said, Ulmer started making "uncomfortably personal gender related comments."

The pressure increased, said Kelly, and she was kept from going to a conference where she was a featured presenter. She said she resigned as director of product development when she did not receive enough assurances that the company would not try to misappropriate her book. She then withdrew her resignation after talking to a lawyer. The company terminated her anyway, she said.

With the book planned for release, Kelly threw herself into promotional activities, but "this all came to a jolting halt five days after I left the company."

That's when NetworkOmni allegedly wrote Kelly's publishers and told her it was a work for hire. The publisher suspended publication until the ownership issue is resolved.

"Instead of being about to celebrate the fruit of many years of my labor, I have been denied the opportunity savor the publication of my book," she wrote. "Professors from universities are waiting on the book ... I have had to turn down potential speaking engagements ... because my book is being held hostage. Now, I am in a constant state of frustration."