NWI was set up in 2003 as a community-based not-for-profit social enterprise in the Northwest of England.

Our Mission
To help marginalised communities out of poverty by providing employment education and training opportunities through the provision of high-quality professional translation and interpreter services

Our Goals

• To provide high quality professional translation and interpreter services.
• To recruit and maintain a team of UK-based translators and interpreters.
• To build a reputation as a professional company, as good as the best “for-profit” commercial businesses.
• To provide innovative added value services in partnership with our clients – supporting them to achieve their wider social goals.
• To use our profits to provide training education and employment opportunities to marginalised communities.

“It’s been a wonderful experience working with NWI.   I am originally from India and my first language is Gujarati. Interpreting and translation work keeps me close to my community and my language. It has also raised my confidence level as it gives me worth when I had no other work. Seeing my work in print and helping the Gujarati community also gives me a sense of pride and satisfaction.  The work has also helped in continuously improving my knowledge of both Gujarati and English languages and services offered by the various agencies and organisations I translate for.”

Social Enterprise

Social enterprises are businesses driven by a social or environmental purpose. There are 62,000 of them in the UK, contributing over £24bn to the economy, employing approximately 800,000 people (2005-2007 data from the Annual Survey of Small Business UK).

As with all businesses, they compete to deliver goods and services. The difference is that social purpose is at the very heart of what they do, and the profits they make are reinvested towards achieving that purpose.

The government defines social enterprises as “businesses with primarily social objectives whose surpluses are principally reinvested for that purpose in the business or in the community, rather than being driven by the need to maximise profit for shareholders and owners.”