Our History
Delivering the same high quality for nearly two decades
For the past 15 years we’ve covered all languages, but Asian Absolute actually began life as an East Asian specialist when it was founded by Henry Clough in the year 2000.
Henry spent much of the 1980s and 1990s in Asia. When he moved into international communications in the UK, he was disappointed to see the number of reputable companies who were using mediocre Asian language translations – despite their very high standards for English communications.
Asian Absolute was established to challenge the status quo by providing translations as engaging and well written as their English counterparts.
How we’ve grown thanks to our clients
2003
We began with an East Asian focus…
…and have offered all world languages to the same high standard since 2003. We first extended our services to cover Middle East and Indic languages, then hired people with the necessary experience and skills to handle European languages.
2004
We expanded our London office and opened our wholly-owned Beijing operation
Asian Absolute Beijing was originally a production centre for projects from the London office, with in-house teams for Chinese translation, as well as typesetting, website and software localisation in all languages.
2006
Asian Absolute was the first UK translation agency to obtain WOFE status in China
In response to a number of international clients who asked to work directly with the China team, we established a client-facing capability in Beijing.
2009
2009 saw us open an office in Melbourne, Australia as a way to deal with the increased workload
Thanks to that, our DTP and typesetting capabilities increased significantly. We were now comfortable typesetting 52 languages, including Amharic, Azeri, Dari and Sinhalese.
2011
We opened a second China production centre in Xi’an
In this year we also opened our office in the Big Apple – New York City – providing coverage for clients in the Americas.
2012
In 2012, we expanded to the beautiful city of Varna, Bulgaria, located on the Black Sea
This step enabled us to better serve our European client base and to develop our Central and Eastern European language capabilities. Our team just got a lot more international!
2014
Our Panama office opened doors
2014 saw the establishment of our production centre in Panama City, supporting clients in North America and joining up with the European and Asian operations to provide non-stop, 24-hour service for worldwide clients.
2016
Rewards and recognition
This was followed by winning the industry’s highly sought-after ATC Project Management Team of the Year Award, and several runners-up prizes for individual Asian Absolute team members, in 2016. In the same year, new offices in Singapore and Bangkok boosted our reach in the ASEAN region.
2017
The ISO certification – a symbol of our commitment to meet the highest standards
The future of Asian Absolute
We’re excited that our growth has brought us to the stage where we can handle the needs of the very largest clients. But no matter how big we get we will continue to focus hard on retaining the personal touch that underpinned our early success. After all, happy clients are still what motivate us to come in to work in the morning.