For a man who has made his money from words, Larry Gould has a surprising intolerance for one of them: "recession".

Mr Gould, whose translation and interpretation group has survived two previous recessions, believes that talking about slowdowns makes them worse. The 56-year-old founder and chief executive of ThebigwordGroup, has switched off the news channels at the company's Leeds head office and cancelled the newspapers. "We've banned any mention of the 'R' word," he says. "It can paralyse people."

That said, he hopes to profit from his competitors' paralysis. "Everybody is very depressed. It is the most tremendous opportunity when other people are depressed. They stop selling, they stop servicing well. Their voices change," he says. "It is not that we tell people that everything is fine, but we believe that out of that 100 per cent market today there is still going to be 90 or 80 per cent of business to go for."

Mr Gould is speaking in his airy glass-walled office, which is part of a modern extension added after the company outgrew its stately wool merchant's mansion.

Perhaps five years in eastern Europe at the height of the cold war in the 1970s, selling American machines to cut cloth for Red Army uniforms, helped form Mr Gould's can-do attitude. It certainly opened his eyes to the need for businesses to communicate in different languages. "I went to a lot of trade shows and all the exhibitors had their literature in the local language and others - except the Brits," he recalls.

Now his company is, according to Common Sense Advisory, a Massachusetts-based consultancy, the 19th biggest in the global translation services sector. It is also the fastest-growing, excluding acquisitions, having increased revenue by more than 50 per cent this year.

Turnover is set to reach £21m ($32m, €23m) this year, up from £1m at the start of the decade. Thebigword employs 280 people, about half of them in Leeds, in sales, project management and administration, and about 7,750 specialist translators, mostly home-based, working in 150 languages across 82 countries.

The company has offices around the world - Tokyo, Los Angeles and Copenhagen were added this year to London, New York, Düsseldorf, Brussels and Beijing.

Thebigword has come a long way since it started out as the Link Up Group, a recruitment and languag­es translation company set up by Mr Gould in 1980. In 1996, he sold the recruitment arm and moved overseas. But pining for England - "I hate exercise but I am a walker, and I missed the seasons" - he re­turned a couple of years later, this time to Hale, in Cheshire, in order to be nearer to Manchester airport.

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Thebigword's headquarters re­main in Mr Gould's Yorkshire home town of Leeds. Headingley, a suburb colonised by students and lecturers from the nearby universities, remains a good base for a language company, he points out, because of the multilingual workforce, and road and rail connections to London and Manchester airport. Emphasising the availability of good graduates and immigrants in the city, he says: "We have grown organically. We have 35 nationalities in this building." His own foreign languages, he adds, are conversational French and "fluent Yorkshire".

The dotcom boom led to a substantial expansion in the translation side of the business from 2001. At this point he tapped venture capitalists for funding, but soon bought them out, and the company is now owned by Mr Gould, his wife Michele and three children. Josh, the eldest son at 25, runs the US operation; his siblings are at university but have spent holidays working for the business since they were 13. "They have to work for their privileges," Mr Gould says.

Thebigword translates anything from stock market announcements to car manuals and with more and more companies looking to do business overseas it is operating in a growing market. This year it became the first non-US firm to be granted a licence to translate for federal agencies.

In these tougher economic times, says Mr Gould, companies that have seen opportunities contract at home may look overseas for business. "One of the most amazing things for us is the international expansion. We are investing a huge amount of money in that," he says. He makes 20 international trips a year.

Innovation is equally crucial to his company's growth, Mr Gould says. It has already pioneered a memory product that can detect the old sections of a new document and refer to a previous translation. For example, if there is an update to a manual, only the altered parts need to be translated.

Most client companies use more than one language services provider both to benefit from different kinds of expertise and to ensure that time-sensitive financial an­nouncements are not lost in any potential power outage or systems failure. So Mr Gould has now of­fered his memory software to competitors who work for the same client company as a way of marketing his services.

"We are using that platform to sell our services to our customers. You can use our platform with another supplier and can use our memory," he says. "We are having to learn how to work with our competitors. I instinctively find that difficult. My instinct is to kill them," he grins mischievously.

Thebigword aims to compete on quality, he says: "We need to do things faster and better and still compete on high quality. We are planning to spend a lot more money on automation of our processes."

Some skills can never be automated, however, and Mr Gould believes that investing in employees pays dividends. "We expect people to work to a high standard, we invest in them. If they don't, we won't keep them."

As the economic climate gets chillier, he is also trying to drive down supplier costs. "We are put­ting a lot of pressure on them to reduce their prices. Where we have got this, we have told these people there could be new contracts. Where not, we will remember afterwards if you do not do something about price now. In several cases they have done something, even if it is only small."

For smaller companies, Thebigword has asked suppliers to extend terms from 30 days to 45 days or take 5-10 per cent off the bill. "They are choosing to take the payment earlier," he says.

"We have got better because we have become more aware of our weaknesses. We have become more profitable than we have ever been. The challenge is very exciting," says the irrepressible survivor of earlier downturns. "There are tremendous opportunities."