CEO named Evanston Chamber of Commerce Businessperson of the Year

Monday, February 11, 2019, Evanston, Illinois – Jill Kushner Bishop, PhD was named 2018 Businessperson of the Year by Evanston Chamber of Commerce.  In an award celebration attended by 175 leaders of the business and not-for-profit community, Dr. Bishop was recognized for her global translation agency, Multilingual Connections, that has been headquartered in Evanston since 2015.

As CEO of Multilingual Connections, Jill has spent the last 14 years helping organizations understand and connect with their multilingual audiences – local, national and global. The company provides document translation, website localization, audio transcription, subtitling, voiceover and phone interpretation in over 75 languages for clients such as the City of Evanston, Northwestern University, State of Illinois, Chicago Cubs, Allstate, BP Global, Google, Airbnb and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.

Bishop founded Multilingual Connections in Chicago in March of 2005. Initially, a workplace language training company, services quickly expanded to include translation, as well as language classes for adults and children. When Bishop relocated the business to Evanston in 2015, she made the decision to shift the company away from language training and to focus exclusively on translation services – a market projected by Commonsense Advisory’s report “The Language Services Market: 2018” to exceed $56 billion by 2021.  

The theme of the chamber award celebration was We Are All Connected, and Bishop addressed the topic of connections in her remarks about living and working in the same small interconnected city: “My business exists to help connect people across the globe, but I also love the connections it’s created much closer to home.”

Previous winners of the Businessperson of the Year include Evanston Mayor Steve Hagerty of Hagerty Consulting and Joseph Liss CPA of Porte Brown LLC.