Walloon translation leader expands in France
In a fully consolidated market, Mons-based Stoquart acquires Lyon-based Version Internationale. It is enough to enter the top 20 of Europe in the sector.
With advances in automated translation tools, one would think that the translation sector would suffer. According to specialized design bureau Nimzi, this is not the case. It should be a market worth around $65 billion in 2022 It will increase by more than 30% by 2026.
in belgium Mons SME Stoquart follows this trend. Presenting itself as the market leader in Wallonia, this company was founded in 1986 by its sole shareholder, English-Spanish translator Dimitri Stockwart. He grew up through internal growth and acquisitions. The company is currently present in Belgium, France, Italy, Czech Republic and Canada. It offers multilingual services, especially in sectors such as IT, medicine, banking, marketing or tourism.
Consolidation
Stoquart attends consolidation movement continues in the sector. It just got stronger in France Restores the International Version, with the support of investment Mons Borinage and Belfius. Based in Lyon, this company caters to major clients whose identity is confidential (one of the first social networks, a major American software publisher, a major airline, etc.). They join Ferrero, Belfius, Siemens, Volvo, OncoDNA, I-Care, the European Union and the online travel giant Stoquart works with.
“Our model is quite atypical.”
What about to increase the turnover of the company to 7 million euros in 2023 according to their forecasts. The company employs 70 people and dozens of freelancers. “Our model is quite atypical, emphasizes the boss; While most agencies employ only a handful of people and outsource to freelancers, we employ project managers and a large team of linguists. optimal quality control.”
Reprise
After failing during the pandemic, Dimitri Stogwart cheers him on capturing certain large customers and acquiring new customers: “In 2022, we did better than in 2019, which allowed us to free up the necessary resources to pursue this acquisition.”
In addition to its direct clients, the company works a lot for “multilingual vendors”, international giants who translate in multiple languages with special machine translation solutions for multinational companies (Microsoft, Google, Amazon, etc.), subcontractors. Activities in specialized offices such as Stoquart. So much so that the latter is in the top 20 of Europe, it succeeds more than 90% of its turnover outside Belgium.
Technology, real or false threat?
For Dimitri Stoquart, automation is now part of the landscape in the professional translation sector, but it has nothing to do with free online tools that anyone can use. “Big companies in the sector use specialized machine translation solutions, he explains; after pre-translation, the content is sent to companies like ours to be checked, improved and corrected.” According to him, “neural translation represents a great advance, but it has the unfortunate flaw of creating ‘beautiful infidels,’ meaning errors are more likely to be overlooked without careful reading.”
As for tools like ChatGPT, they raise fears because, he says, “these solutions automatically learn from the content available on the web. Finally, there is a risk of using the wrong content generated by artificial intelligence. Thus, the quality of AI may deteriorate rather than improve because it will only be based on content that is believed to be 70% factually correct.”
