In February 2008, the Common Sense Advisory published its Localization Vendor Management report that summarized the common concerns of business buyers of translation and localization services and gave guidance on best practices for managing Language Service Providers. The report found out that most corporations in demand for language services end up with multiple LSPs to fulfill their language requirements across a range of corporate functions and geographies and that, on the other hand, nearly 90 percent of LSPs outsource some or all of their translation and localization work.
And in that same month, precisely on February 15, 2008, a quite unusual LSP – with an in-house concept to cover the full circle of project management, quality assurance, engineering, desktop publishing, and language solutions for business clients – opened its first US office.
After a lengthy selection process, the Germany headquartered international translation company EVS Translations GmbH, picked up Atlanta, the home of the German-American Chamber of Commerce, as the best location for its US subsidiary.
EVS Translations USA hired its General Manager on March 1 2008, to head the company in times when the economic downturn increased the search for new markets and global opportunities and naturally, the demand for professional B2B language services. Later that year, the Globalization and Localization Association (GALA), an international non-profit association that encourages local communication as an indispensable component to a global strategy, released results of a survey of its 300 member companies that showed a nearly 30% growth rate of the top 20 LSPs and the strong overall growth in work volume and employee numbers “expected to continue for years to come” and the tekom tcworld magazine published a forecast on the translation market in ten years’ time, meaning as of today. The forecast suggested the further development of machine translation as a solution for managing the growing translation volumes (70% of the respondents to the above-mentioned GALA survey reported as not currently providing a machine translation offering for their customers), and emphasized the future significant role of professional project and quality management, predicting a near future where “LSPs directly adopt a part of project management tasks, which currently are performed by the clients, who would eventually start regarding translation services as investment and not merely as costs.”
As for EVS Translations USA, the goals that were originally supposed to have been achieved in five years ended up requiring twice longer, with a milestone in the middle to celebrate the 10th employee on board days after our blog reported on how the Global South-Atlanta’s international business boom fuels demand for language services. The lucky even number 10 employee joined the in-house IT engineering team in July 2013 to support the growing demand of orders for multilingual website and SEO localization services and DTP.
Today, when EVS Translations is a single-source market leader in language solutions with 8 offices across Europe and North America and over 150 in-house project and quality managers, translators and proofreaders, IT engineers in File Engineering, Desktop Publishing, and Translation Technology teams, EVS Translations USA is on the look for its next tenth employee, the lucky number 20, and to the next ten years of partnering with corporations and vendor managers who regard language services as investment rather than mere costs.
