A2ZTranslate Ltd. began in 2002 as a home business, established by Mark Berghan. Mark had recently returned to Aotearoa from over a decade living in Japan. Having never even heard a word of Japanese before landing there in 1990, Mark soon abandoned textbooks and instead focussed on learning Japanese the way people use it on the street, in the supermarket and, of course, in the izakaya and bars of his second home, Nagoya. Working over the years variously as a dive instructor, a writer and magazine editor, his last role in Japan was in international marketing support for a large tertiary education chain, using the then new technology of the internet to target international students thinking about studying in Japan, marketing to them in their own language. 

On returning to NZ it was obvious international education was beginning to really grow here as well, and leveraging the knowledge gained from Japan Mark started offering multilingual support services to the education market in NZ. A2ZTranslate Ltd. was founded and continues to support this market as one of its core areas of competency. 

In 2004 A2ZTranslate moved into shared offices with branding and video production agency OBD Ltd., a business cohabitation and collaboration that continues to this day. Of course, in business nothing ever goes smoothly. In 2007 Mark returned to Japan to open a branch office of A2ZTranslate in Nagoya, while also establishing remote representatives in Brazil, China and Europe. While initially business was solid and growing, nek minnit? 2008 and the GFC scorches across the globe!  Consequently we wound up the Japanese operation 2010, and decided to focus entirely on the NZ operation and "stick to the knitting", as they say.

Over the years the translation industry has changed incredibly; the evolution of CAT tools from clunky desktop software to cloud based apps enabling inter-continental real-time collaboration, the rise in subtitling of business promotional videos and the increased demand for legal and commercial translation and interpreting services as the domestic NZ market becomes more and more linguistically diverse (but we won't mention the rise of software driven translations such as Google translate, as for most professional purposes it just isn't good enough, yet...). Consequently at A2ZTranslate we are continually adding to our skillsets both in translation and associated services; developing procedures and processes to enable translation directly into most publishing formats (Indesign etc. for company brochures and promotional materials), up-skilling staff so they can use the right tools to transcribe, translate, place and render subtitles accurately and fluently, and ensuring that our translations are consistently accurate, fluent and useable.