Iolar and flexword sign strategic partnership agreement, launch first joint projects and expand their service portfolio
The founders and CEOs of Iolar and flexword, Borut Rismal and Goranka Miš-Čak, have signed a strategic cooperation agreement.
(Mannheim/Walldorf, July 2025) Those who are familiar with the translation industry in Germany know that Iolar, one of the top 5 language service providers in South-East Europe, has also been represented on the German market since 2023 with Iolar Germany GmbH. In turn, flexword, one of the leading language service providers in Germany in terms of technology, has been represented in South-East Europe with its location in Serbia since 2014. The aim of the collaboration is to jointly invest in technology and process innovations, as well as to expand the service portfolio to include process management solutions and other enterprise IT solutions.
“This is an exciting and stimulating time, with enormous creative possibilities and development potential. The translation market is developing rapidly. The challenge is to focus on the right technology and the right processes,” says Goranka Miš-Čak, herself a graduate translator, and founder and CEO of the flexword Group.
flexword and Iolar complement one another almost perfectly, both structurally and in their professional and technological orientation, and all stakeholders should benefit from this. “Our clients are the main beneficiaries of joint investments in technology and processes. With the strategic cooperation that has now been initiated, both companies are consolidating their positions as high-end language service providers,” adds Borut Rismal, who has a background in engineering and information technology and has been at home in the localisation sector since 1992 as founder and CEO of the Iolar Group, among other things.
Something that very few people know today is that Iolar emerged from an IT company in the early 1990s before conquering the translation market via software localisation. For example, Iolar has been a Trados reseller since 2004 and has had its own Nvidia GPU-based hardware, developed in-house, since 2022. What’s so special about this system? It enables the use of machine translation engines and AI-based translation processes in an isolated IT environment without allowing any data transfer ‘to the outside’.
“This solution for closed MT and AI processes is precisely the answer we need to meet our clients’ demands regarding data protection and data security,” adds Miš-Čak.
The strategic partnership that has now been established lays the foundation for a new positioning on the translation market. However, the joint projects go far beyond the mere optimisation of translation and localisation processes. flexword and Iolar are already in the midst of expanding their joint portfolio to include other business areas such as process management, knowledge management, sentiment analysis processes, MT and AI implementation, as well as enterprise IT solutions including system administration for language service providers and other SMEs.
“The synergies and overlaps between flexword and Iolar are considerable,” say Rismal and Miš-Čak. With the new business divisions, both corporate groups are aiming for growth of 30% in 2026.
About flexword Translators & Consultants
flexword Translators & Consultants, headquartered in Mannheim, is one of the top professional language service providers in Germany. The managing director is Goranka Miš-Čak, a graduate translator who founded the company in 1992. Over the course of more than 30 years, flexword has built up a customer base of over 1,000 clients from industry, business, science and research, as well as government institutions, and as a full-service provider has made a name for itself in its core competence of translation services. As one of the first full-service language service providers, the company already worked in accordance with DIN EN 15038 for translation services, the predecessor standard to DIN EN ISO 17100. The owner-managed group of companies, with locations in Germany, the USA, the UK and Serbia, has a global pool of over 6,500 academically trained, experienced specialist translators, proofreaders, interpreters and language engineers. Thanks to the cross-location project organisation, qualified project managers implement language service projects of any size professionally, reliably and with the shortest possible turnaround times.
About Iolar
For the past 30 years, IOLAR Group has been synonymous with high competence and reliability in the field of translation and localisation services.
With 8 offices in 6 countries: Slovenia, Hungary, Austria, Macedoina, Croatia and Serbia, the IOLAR Group is the leading language service provider in the South-East Europe region. The company currently employs over 65 highly-trained language specialists and engineers. It provides its clients with multiple services, ranging from translation of difficult technical documentation to software localisation packages for the languages of the European Union as well as those of Eastern Europe and the Balkans.
Press contact
flexword Holding GmbH
Neckarauer Strasse 35-41
68199 Mannheim
Germany
phone +49 621 39747821
office@flexword.de