TALKING GLOBAL WOMAN HELPS COMPANIES LIKE DISNEY SPEAK FOREIGN LANGUAGES LIKE PROS.

WESTLAKE VILLAGE - Irene Agnew is only too happy to bid the days of English-only business adios. Annyonghe gasipsiyo. Do svidanja.

The language expert, president of the Conejo Valley-based Agnew Tech II, makes her trade in turning businesses into polyglots, taking their traditional trade materials and translating them for a global audience. So when Disney needs Mufasa and his ``Lion King'' cohorts to speak Korean, or Boeing wants to brush up on its Russian, Agnew's phone starts ringing.

``Long ago, the American philosophy was well, if they want to buy things from us, they can learn English,'' Agnew said. ``Now companies are learning that you just can't do that anymore.''

Not that this is exactly news to her - the multilingual entrepreneur has been learning the tongues of the world since birth. The child of Russian emigrants who fled the communist revolution, Agnew was born in Harbin, China in 1927. The family moved to Japan several years later, where she developed a working knowledge of both local languages before the family moved again, relocating to the United States in 1941.

Raised speaking both Russian and English, she later put her talents to use for the State Department, intercepting Soviet broadcasts and translating them for government use. In 1986, she decided to try private practice, opening a business translation firm specializing in French, German, Italian and Spanish. Over time, it's grown from a homespun operation that handled a few brochures and communiques into a tightly run effort that boasts of being able to handle every imaginable tongue.

``It was quite cumbersome in the old days,'' Agnew said. ``You had to have translators physically available. With the Internet, we can have the best translators in China and Japan.''

Though the firm employs only 12 full-time workers, it has an immense database of fluent speakers on call - more than 1,200 translators worldwide. The Internet, Agnew said, has grown the business tremendously, allowing for communication with native speakers who haven't lost their feeling for the dialects.

``We have to use people steeped in the language,'' she said. ``If they've lived here too long, their language gets corrupted by English.''

Thus, no Spanglish blends creep into documents destined for Spain and Web sites intended for an audience in Quebec won't refer to ``le weekend.'' Such accuracy is critical for furthering business ties in markets where English is not the lingua franca, according to James Bennett, a professor of business communication for California State University, Northridge.

``We tell students to be much more aware of the other cultures both internationally and domestically,'' he said. ``This would enhance business activity if people were more aware of the culture that they're dealing with. It helps awareness and understanding.''

And that awareness can be a major issue, according to Agnew. The firm guards itself against the circulated e-mail jokes about advertising gaffes in foreign markets - ads pitching pens that won't make your pockets pregnant, cars whose name means ``it won't go'' and sodas that revive dead ancestors - with a fear that borders on paranoia, Agnew said.

``A Web site is seen by millions of people instantly,'' she said. ``Lots of people just use machine translation to do sites, and they don't realize that you can be a laughing stock to a whole country if you do it wrong.''

Firms that use Agnew's services look for this accuracy when entrusting their content to the translators. Bosley Medical Institute, a Beverly Hills hair transplant firm, needed precision on three fronts when it called Agnew for some document updates. Based in America, but owned by Japanese investors and doing significant business in Mexico, Bosley needed to become trilingual quickly.

``We're a worldwide company, so we need to have all of our story accurately translated,'' said George Fettig, Bosley's vice president of marketing. ``When you're a medical company, it's very important to be accurate and interpreted in the in-country language the way it should be so people aren't under the wrong impression.''

Whether it's in Cajun French or Swahili, Agnew is willing to tackle any tongue, helping companies become international and guarding against embarrassing errors.

``We never refuse a language - we're doing Disney titles in Thai right now,'' Agnew said. ``We have translators for every language in the world, almost, and if we don't have it, we'll get it.''

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(1 -- 2 -- color) Above, Irene Agnew, president of Agnew Tech II, shows some of her reference files for translation. Agnew, who is multilingual herself, uses 1,200 translators worldwide. She says it is important to use people who are steeped in the languages. Patricio San Martin, left, a translation manager for Agnew Tech II, works on translating a bank's Web site into Spanish.

Michael Owen Baker/Staff Photographer