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If you give birth to the first son in four generations of your family from Sumatra, Indonesia, how do you share the news with family overseas who speak Bahasa Melayu?

Tamra Lewis would be up for the challenge.

The 35-year-old has a serious appreciation for precise comprehension. As founder and president/CEO of Pangea Lingua Translations & Communications, the largest interpretation agency in the state, her reputation and the reputation of her company thrive on accurate communication.

The result is a rapidly growing Indianapolis-based business with big-name clients – including ABC Sports, Delta Faucet, Ford Motor Co., Procter & Gamble, Roche Diagnostics and Walt Disney Co.

Despite impressive recognition, including being ranked by the Indiana University Kelley School of Business and Corporate Sponsors as a Growth 100 company, and Lewis being honored by Indianapolis Business Journal as of one its "40 Under 40" two years ago, the company isn't too big for its global britches.

An Indianapolis woman whose Hungarian husband passed away counts on Pangea Lingua's services to translate letters to and from her in-laws in Hungary. The label on a shampoo bottle is localized for a French audience. A birth certificate is converted into Portuguese.

Every translation is composed, edited, proofread and finally approved, checking and double-checking for accuracy.

The company's goal of flawlessness isn't exactly understated in the offices at Pangea Lingua on Washington Boulevard near 36th Street. A framed poster of an 1920s Italian race car fills a wall in the cozy conference room with the word "Exactitude" boldly printed along the bottom. The office's interior is comfortable as well, with her husband, Michael Mullen's, emergency martini bar housed in a cabinet next to "Exactitude." Mullen, a stockbroker for Solomon Smith Barney, and Lewis married two years ago.

Lewis bought the circa-1920 house-turned-office in 1997, marking the official opening of Pangea Lingua. In early June, wearing a black suit sprinkled with a confetti of colorful buttons, she offers the tour amid murmurs of World Cup results. Lewis jokes she had to keep a close eye on everyone, considering her staff includes fans from Brazil, Colombia and other soccer-enthused countries.

Latin music flows from the front of the house where Alessandra Matas, a global project manager originally from Brazil, greets visitors, while a Japanese fountain trickles in the entryway. Hungary-born Gábor Várkonyi, who graduated from Butler University, serves as the Eastern European project manager and offers coffee.

A local artisan's handmade tiles based on a Berlin-inspired poster make up the back-splash in the modern kitchen. The bathroom walls are an impressionist work of art, a French scene painted in Henri Matisse style.

Amid photos of friends, family and her Wheaten Terrier, Lewis' personal bookshelf is stocked with a range of titles, including Peter Mayle's bestselling A Year in Provence, The Biography of Anais Nin by Deirdre Bair, A History of the Southern Confederacy, a book by P.J. O'Rourke and various histories of the world. Her CD collection spans the globe, from French artists and world soccer music to Brazilian lullabies and a German rap CD.

Perhaps the most important room to Lewis is her blond, blue-eyed, 1-year-old son Sean's nursery, just up the stairs from her office. "I wanted to have my cake and eat it too," she says. During the day, Lewis' mom, Pat Dameron, looks after Sean. If her employees have children, the nursery will be open for their little ones too, says Lewis, who has to keep her mind on the business of translation.

"A lot of our clients are blind men buying art," she says. Pangea Lingua customers usually have little idea if the translation they're paying for is accurate – until an end-user reading or hearing the translation has a complaint.

Eli Lilly & Co. and Pfizer Inc. have counted on Pangea Lingua's accuracy to translate global protocols in dozens of countries and just as many languages for projects that can last a full year. With its video and on-screen talent capabilities, Pangea Lingua has paired Hispanic actors with appropriate translations to introduce Latin America to the RCA Digital Satellite System of Thomson Consumer Electronics (now Thomson multimedia). Lewis says you never would have known the commercials were produced in the Midwest.

"It doesn't matter if it's there on time. If it's not absolutely perfect then you're still in big trouble," she says. "You're not selling widgets where out of every million widgets only one is defective." Editors who are native speakers have to sign off on every project to give clients confidence in the results. But Lewis is quick to point out that she has little to offer her business in terms of translation expertise.

She speaks her native English along with a little German, "like a kindergartner." Lewis says her biggest contribution is bringing people to the company who enjoy the work as much as she does. She has surrounded herself with translators, editors, linguists, a small international staff and an extensive stable of independent free-lancers around the globe.

"They're the experts. They are so much more qualified than I am. I'm just the head cheerleader and team leader," she says. "They're really the ones who make it happen and they're dedicated and they don't take anything less than perfect – they just don't accept it."

Lewis could contribute that cheerleader energy and those team leader organizational skills to any business, but translation and communication on an international scale piqued her interest early.

The petite brunette's upbringing near Fort Hood, Texas, introduced her to different skin colors, traditions and languages. Covering the same land area as the city of Dallas, the massive Army base boasts a daytime population of more than 150,000 retired and active military personnel, family members, civilian employees and others, representing innumerable nationalities. Many foreign nationals come to Fort Hood for love, following a military man back to the United States.

When Lewis was a little girl, Latin American, Korean and German mothers raised their daughters with traditions and dialects different from hers, and she was intrigued. Her first hands-on international experience came in trips to Canada and Mexico as a teen-ager. Her grandmother worked as a computer consultant in civil service and traveled often, bringing back souvenirs from Germany for her granddaughter.

Supplementing her interest in other countries was an innate tendency toward entrepreneurship. To make some extra money in high school, she set up a camera tripod behind home plate at children's baseball games and took shots of kids up to bat. She would process and mount the photos, and at the following game sell copies to parents.

Spending time with divorced parents meant summers in Indiana and schooling in Texas for Lewis, but after high school she returned to Indianapolis for college at IUPUI, where she studied organizational communications and, on the side, nurtured her love for photography and business.

One personal project included the Campus Men, 1989 calendar, which the 20-year-old sold to fellow students. Featuring sultry college guys in stonewashed denim jackets and splatter-painted blazers, the calendar of sexy hunks advanced Lewis in her self-imposed education in the business world. She also took on free-lance sports photography at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and family portraits, and got a job at a photo lab to get discounts on supplies.

Despite a couple of years of college under her belt, and a diverse free-lance business on the side, Lewis realized she wasn't happy with her situation.

"I'd always wanted to travel overseas. And I just thought, ‘If I don't do it now, when will I do it?' " she recalls. She'd read books by Christopher Isherwood, author of acclaimed The Berlin Stories, which depicts pre-Hitler Berlin as a place of glamour and corruption.

"It was a Western city, an occupied city behind the Iron Curtain," says Lewis, her blue-gray eyes flashing. "I was fascinated by Berlin. I knew Americans were there because we were occupying the city, so I thought it can't be that dangerous." With enough money in her pocket, Lewis dropped out of college and bought a one-way ticket to Berlin in the beginning of 1989, just months before the Berlin Wall came to a historic crash.

After a few months in Germany, she ran out of money and took a job for the director of Trans World Airlines as a kindermadchen, or nanny, to his two children, and tutored German and Turkish people in English.

She audited architecture classes at Frei Universitat and, with a resident's stamp in her passport, enrolled at Die Volkshochschule für Auslander in the Dahlem neighborhood to learn German. "It was a little United Nations," Lewis says of her class, with students from Jamaica, New Zealand, Russia and Poland sharing a common language of, albeit broken, German.

"It was hysterical some of the things we would misunderstand," Lewis says. Relaying a night out at the disco to a Russian classmate, Lewis confused "tasch" (meaning "purse") with "tisch" (meaning table).

" ‘She left her table at the bar,' " Lewis told the confused Russian woman about a friend. " ‘Yeah, it's her favorite table, she takes it on the bus, she takes the table everywhere.' And she (the Russian listener) just thought that was an American custom. So these things happened all the time. I was always saying the wrong thing or being inappropriate because I didn't know any better.

"The first time I went to a biergarten and ordered a beer it was loud, so I held up my index finger and I got two beers. I thought, ‘What a great country.' " Lewis soon learned an outstretched thumb means one; an index finger is two. A first-hand appreciation of translation and understanding took root.

"Living there and working there, I saw so many things in English – because it was occupied, so Americans were everywhere as well as the British – and things were translated, but you know we wouldn't say it like that in English," Lewis says.

"As I lived there longer, I started noticing more things, and I wondered why they wouldn't just ask a native person? Even a high-school student could tell you we don't say it like that. And so it became clear to me that, in some instances, there was a serious lack of project management, lack of quality control throughout the whole process of localizing something from one language and culture to another. And I just thought I could do it."

On Nov. 9, 1989, the city abruptly changed. The Berlin Wall, separating East Germans and Berliners from family, friends, freedom and democracy, fell after 28 years. Eastern Europeans and East Germans flooded into Berlin, a city that had been divided by communism's once heavy hand.

Lewis reacted by going to her local market and buying fresh oranges and bananas, handing them out to those who didn't have the money or the means to get fruit.

"People were hugging us and crying, and we were crying and people were drinking champagne everywhere. It was just the most unbelievable experience," she says. "I watched the 10-year anniversary of the wall coming down on TV and I just sat there and cried, but it was a good cry. It was just such an incredible thing."

By the end of November, Lewis says, the honeymoon was over.

"It was such an unsure time. Berlin and Germany were inundated with immigrants from all over Eastern Europe. It was like the floodgates opened. There were abandoned cars everywhere. You couldn't move in the city. It was like a big discombobulated flea market because you had all these Eastern Europeans setting up tables in the streets trying to sell whatever little trinkets they had – Russian military paraphernalia and things like that."

The value of the Deutsche Mark was unstable. East Germany's economy was practically worthless. Bank lines were so long that you no longer could bank because East Germans were getting Deutsche Marks, Lewis recalls. When Allied forces started reducing their numbers and pulling out of Berlin, Lewis said to herself, "OK, the party's over. It's time to go back home and figure out what I'm going to do with my career and my life."

She boarded Pan Am's last flight to exit Berlin and headed toward home. She hasn't been back since, but her experiences haven't been forgotten.

When Lewis returned home in 1990 she began investigating how she could become involved in a consulting position in the field of translation and communication. At the same time, she re-enrolled at IUPUI, continuing her communications and German studies, and took a server job at Keystone Grill.

One of her first steps toward Pangea Lingua was to raid the Indiana University library in Bloomington for international telephone listings. She photocopied hundreds of pages of contact information on translation businesses, advertising agencies, creative companies and product-engineering businesses around the world.

She made invaluable contacts, including Helmi Banta, an Indianapolis woman from Panama who coordinated more than 500 volunteers and translators for the 1987 Pan American Games and speaks three languages. She worked with almost every advertising agency and production company in town. She "knew people with real jobs." She got business. She earned and kept clients' trust.

By her early 20s, years before she bought the stylish Pangea Lingua offices on Washington Boulevard, Lewis was serving as a free-lance language consultant for Eli Lilly & Co. She also was managing the localization of a parts catalog for AM General Corp.'s Gulf War-era Hummer for Saudi generals and Israeli leaders, translating to Arabic and Hebrew. Her client list included Cummins Engine, Rolls Royce and Delta Faucet.

Pangea Lingua's roots didn't start out as a grand idea, but as a "successful project after another project," Lewis says. It took off from a series of confidences earned through contacts. Lewis recognized a real need and created a successful business around it.

After a couple of years, business got so busy she decided to put her education on hold. She still has a couple of classes to finish up, but is in the classroom lecturing on international marketing and business to I.U. Kelley School of Business students. She says she helps students to know what to expect and encourages them to take foreign language classes.

"Studying other languages makes you aware of your own language much more," says Lewis, who stresses the importance of keeping an eye on the world. She demonstrates this philosophy through classes for travelers abroad. "Working in this environment, sometimes it's like traveling. Like working in the Cultural Cafés (classes) and the different little things that we do, it does make you feel like, ‘Well, did I go to Paris this weekend?' "

With the World Trade Club of Indiana and International Center of Indianapolis, Lewis housed a South African delegation in Indiana learning about the U.S. election process.

Recently, she's teaming with Extreme Productions International Inc. to bring together the international race scene with Indianapolis residents through Velocity, a party at the Indiana Roof Ballroom this month celebrating Formula One. Eighty percent of the ticket sales will go to the Indianapolis affiliate of the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation. She hopes putting money into the local group ultimately will have a global impact, but reaching across the nation's borders is more than the right thing to do, Lewis says.

"In the U.S. we tend to be very myopic about the rest of the world. You have to be aware of what's going on around you. If Germany didn't pay attention to what was going on around them – when they had the Iron Curtain – if you just ignore it, you'll get surprised," she says. "I think people welcome our technology and welcome our innovations, and they welcome our exuberance for being pioneers for things such as medicine and technology, but they also resent an attitude that Americans have.

"I think we don't pay attention. We don't know anything about other cultures. And I think sometimes people get offended."

Lewis' business objective is simple: translating words for another culture and language. But it's also arranging communication and understanding across international lines – but not without some hard work and an easy charm.