History

With roots dating back more than 50 years, the RWS Group was created from a merger between M.H. Randall & Partners (a specialist translation company) and Woolcott & Co (a specialist patent and technical information searching company) in 1982. RWS Translations Ltd and RWS Information Ltd were ISO 9000 Accredited in 1992.

Locations

RWS Group headquarters are based in Chalfont St Peter, Buckinghamshire, UK. Its Information Division is based in Tavistock Square, London. A subsidiary UK company Eclipse Translations

Eclipse Translations

-History and Overview:The company, Eclipse Translations Ltd, was formed in December 1996 and has been a wholly owned subsidiary of RWS Holdings plc since 2005. Eclipse operates as a Limited Company within the RWS Group....

 is based in Alnwick, Northumberland. The Group has production sites in Germany

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

, Japan

Japan

Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...

 and China

China

Chinese civilization may refer to:* China for more general discussion of the country.* Chinese culture* Greater China, the transnational community of ethnic Chinese.* History of China* Sinosphere, the area historically affected by Chinese culture...

, and offices in France

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

, Switzerland

Switzerland

Switzerland name of one of the Swiss cantons. ; ; ; or ), in its full name the Swiss Confederation , is a federal republic consisting of 26 cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities. The country is situated in Western Europe,Or Central Europe depending on the definition....

 and the USA.

Services

RWS is a leading provider of intellectual property

Intellectual property

Intellectual property is a term referring to a number of distinct types of creations of the mind for which a set of exclusive rights are recognized—and the corresponding fields of law...

 support services and high level technical, legal and financial translation

Translation

Translation is the communication of the meaning of a source-language text by means of an equivalent target-language text. Whereas interpreting undoubtedly antedates writing, translation began only after the appearance of written literature; there exist partial translations of the Sumerian Epic of...

services. It is the market leader in patent translations, translating over 50,000 patents and intellectual property related documents each year.
It addresses a blue-chip multinational client base from Europe, North America and Japan, active in patent filing in the medical, pharmaceutical, chemical, aerospace, defence, automotive and telecoms industries, as well as patent agents acting on behalf of such clients.
The Group has two principal business activities; Translations, which incorporates patent, commercial and technical translation services, and Information, which includes a comprehensive range of patent search, retrieval and monitoring services as well as PatBase http://www.patbase.com (developed in partnership with Minesoft Ltd) http://minesoft.com, a searchable commercial patent database, available as a subscription service.

Awards

The Group won the Queen's Award for Export Achievement in 1987 and 1984 and the Award for Enterprise: International Trade in 2004 and 2009.