Nottingham HQ translates to success for global firm
The Nottingham-based UK headquarters of a corporate translation company, EVS Translations, is celebrating its 20th anniversary.
Based in the city’s professional district on Regent Street, the Nottingham office is part of an eight-strong group across the business. EVS Translations also has offices in the USA, Bulgaria and four in Germany, where it was founded in 1991 by Edward R Vick, a British entrepreneur who grew up in Nottingham.
Today, EVS Translations employs almost 200 people, 90 of which work as translators at one of their five global locations.
It is a leading provider of certified language services to most of the global top 20 law firms, regulatory, government and public sector bodies; as well as to the legal departments of Fortune 500 corporations.
Its specialists check the target language against the source text to guarantee both technical and linguistic accuracy, while ensuring that correct and consistent terminology has been used throughout the document.
The UK office was created to meet the market demand for German into English translations, with Nottingham an obvious choice for the location given Edward Vick’s background, the city’s easy access to the European markets via the regional airports and its central UK location.
However, according to Vick, analysis over 2017-2018 translations for the UK office shows that English into French remains the most popular requirement for EVS Translations UK’s growing portfolio of international clients.
He said: “There are a number of factors behind this in terms of English/French popularity at EVS Translations, not least a major order from a global broadcaster to cover two high profile sporting events last year. Indeed, French was scored third most important language for UK business in the British Council’s 2017 Languages For the Future report. Spanish made the top spot while Mandarin was scored second.
“One might expect with the spectre of Brexit looming large over 2017 and 2018 that demand would be dominated by EU languages and our data did largely agree with their study in terms of the top 10.
“Despite China’s appeal, with its massive consumer market to tap into, it’s Japanese that makes it into our top 10 with Russian the only other non-EU language. Could concerns such as those relating to intellectual property be hindering the demand from UK companies to do business with this country?”
As for the most in-demand languages of the next five years, Vick said: “EU languages will continue to dominate, although the popularity of Spanish is in part explained by opportunities in the emerging markets of South America. Brexit has the potential to bring new trade opportunities for UK business, so demand for Asian languages will most likely increase. Korean should get an honourable mention this year, as it came close to making our top 10 for the first time. It’s unlikely to overtake Japanese, however, since Tokyo2020 is now firmly on the horizon. Will they outperform China in our list for 2019?’
