ATC’s Member of the Month: Geo Language Services

The ATC’s Member of the Month for September 2026 is Geo Language Services, a Guildford-based language service company celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, and a finalist in the Company of the Year category at the 2026 ATC Language Industry Awards.

We caught up with Geo’s Co-Founder Giles Poole to talk about two decades of quality obsession, a pragmatic take on new technology, and how Geo has grown from a translation provider into a genuine trusted advisor for its clients.

Twenty years of making sure everyone sleeps at night

Geo’s story started 20 years ago when Giles and his business partner Heli Tirkkonen decided to strike out on their own, having previously managed the translation department of an education company.

From day one, quality was the point. “We really, really wanted to focus on the quality aspect, and that was going to be our driving force,” Giles explains. Geo became one of the first companies in the country to be certified to BS EN 15038, the forerunner of today’s ISO 17100, and that early discipline has never let up. “Everything we did, we knew that it had been through a proper quality process, not just ticking a box, so that we, our team, and our clients could sleep at night.”

For the next 15 years, Geo did next to no marketing. Growth came almost entirely through referrals and winning tenders, particularly in regulatory sectors where quality is non-negotiable. That focus has carried the company into life sciences, where it is now especially well known, and into what Giles calls “earth, environment, energy”: geosciences, oil and gas, seismic work and environmental content, where regulatory approvals demand absolute precision.

A pinch of salt with your AI

Geo has always been tech-positive, but never tech-dogmatic. Back when most agencies picked one translation memory tool and stuck with it, Geo ran four at once, switching tools  depending on what actually worked best.

That same pragmatism now applies to AI. Geo does a lot of AI dubbing and voiceover work, and can tell clients precisely which voices and languages will work and which will not, since results vary wildly from accent to accent.

“It’s about finding what works for clients and what doesn’t, and hand-holding them through AI slop, because unmanaged it really can be a mess,” says Giles.

Internally, the company has built more than fifteen in-house apps to streamline its own processes, from quoting to terminology extraction. One favourite generates certificates for life sciences documents, a job that once tied up an in-house team member for weeks. “We’ve built an app now that will do 960 certificates in 60 seconds.” AI, in other words, is a tool for efficiency, not a replacement for the quality checks Geo’s multi-skilled PM and QA teams still run meticulously.

From translators to trusted advisors

Since lockdown, when demand for subtitling and voiceover shot up as clients moved conferences online, Geo has expanded well beyond translation. The company now organises conferences, commissions medical writers, sources bilingual moderators and even helps clients track down clinicians for international studies. “It’s a two-way thing,” Giles says. “A client will ask us to find a Hindi-speaking headache specialist in India, we’ll help with that, and before you know it we’re in charge of all language needs for their next international medical conference.”

Geo’s is a position built on a small, close-knit team of ten, many recruited as MA graduates from the nearby University of Surrey and trained not just in translation but in typesetting, subtitling and audio and video editing. Several colleagues have stayed for over a decade, a rare feat in an industry with high turnover.

Twenty years on, Geo’s advice to itself, and to the industry, remains the same as it was at the start: figure out what genuinely works, apply it properly, and never let the tools do the thinking that quality control still requires.

Giles Poole was in conversation with ATC CEO Raisa McNab.