Leeds-based language services company thebigword has announced record turnover growth in its latest financial results. While investment in technology and securing new clients affected profits, the business still expects ‘substantial’ growth in 2020.

Founded by Larry Gould, thebigword has a team of around 600 employees and more than 15,000 linguists across its 12 global offices.

The latest results for the year ending 31 May 2019 show turnover of £84.9m, a rise from £76.4m in 2017/18.

Pre-tax profit was £1.28m, compared with £2.69m the previous year.

Chairman Larry Gould said: "I was delighted that thebigword Group achieved its highest ever revenue total of over £84.8m ($109m), with strong growth in every division.

"During the last 12 months thebigword made a strategic investment to complete our Wordsynk platform which will process over $100m per year through it by 2021.

"To do this, we increased technology related spending by 80 per cent. This inevitably has led to strong revenue growth and in this current year, we expect strong profit growth.

"It is our mission to give everyone the power to communicate without language barriers and to do so; we aim to put that power into the palm of your hands with WordSynk.

"WordSynk is a highly disruptive product and combines all services, from translation through to transcription and interpreting in one mobile enabled language technology platform.

"WordSynk will also house thebigword's new proprietary machine translation (MT) offering towards the end of 2020, in testing we found that our MT had reached parity with human translation in many language pairs and incorporated clients preferred style.

"Wordsynk will put thebigword Group in a very strong position to take advantage of the expected explosion of content localization in 2020 and beyond and we are extremely confident about the future and expect substantial profit growth in 2020."

Thebigword recently opened a new operations centre in Pune, India to support its specialised translation and interpretation services. It is also partnering with IT company Techwave on a Digital Centre of Excellence in Hyderabad.