When she was a child in Czechoslovakia Kateřina Janků’s parents, Rudolf Forstinger and Eva Forstingerová, joined in the 1968 “Prague Spring” revolt against Soviet domination, but their cries for freedom were silenced when Warsaw Pact forces crushed the rebellion. The family was blacklisted with no hope of finding work after siding with the reformers against the Communist regime.
To put bread on the table they secretly created a language translation business, Moravia Translations. In 1990, with the fall of the U.S.S.R. and the successful “Velvet Revolution,” economic and social liberalization finally came to Czechoslovakia, bringing with it the introduction of free enterprise in Central and Eastern Europe. As companies from the West scrambled to gain a foothold in the formerly forbidden markets, Moravia was ideally positioned to help them.
Katya – as she is known by friends and associates – joined the family business and saw an opportunity to expand its scope to include localization, testing and engineering, and language technology services. She and co-founder Arturo Quintero transformed what is now Moravia Worldwide to focus on high-tech translation and language services, and by 2000 most of its revenue came from these specialized services – 75 percent of it from Fortune 500 companies. Moravia later developed a solution for life-sciences localization and is a major vendor to a wide range of medical-device, pharmaceutical and healthcare companies.
Katya now serves as chairman of the board of directors of the company based in Brno, Czech Republic. Consistently ranked among the 20 largest language services providers globally, Moravia employs 450 professionals in nine centers in seven countries around the globe.
Moravia is a leading provider of translation, localization, and testing services. Our globalization solutions enable companies to enter global markets with high quality localized products and services that meet the language and functionality requirements of customers in any locale. Learn more at Moravia.com
