A Marketer’s Life

You would have to be blind to not see that many types of jobs have left America. But while this trend has been visible for at least a decade, translation firms are experiencing an increase in demand.. Most industry insiders will admit that demand is solid for people with advanced linguistic skills from the following countries: Japan, Mexico, Brazil, Russia, Germany, Saudi Arabia and China. It’s important to realize though that the need for skilled Chinese Interpretation workers is often at the cost of workers from America and other industrialized countries. In these countries, highly skilled workers are at risk of having their jobs eliminated and moved to a third world country. Because we all know people who have lost their jobs due to offshoring, more and more lawmakers and media sources are spending more time to address these issues.

What Drives The Translation & Interpretation Industry?
Offshoring can be defined as organizational activities that were previously performed internally and are now provided by external agents. In an interview with The New York Times, an owner of a Portuguese Interpretation agency stated, “Outsourcing appears to work contrary to the claim that free trade will create the jobs of tomorrow in America when high-tech or high paying white-collar jobs are transferred to or created in foreign countries.” Frequently, work is offshored in order to reduce labor expenses. But sometimes companies have other reasons that include the need to overcome regulations by entering new markets and even to be closer to a more talented workforce. Even though the reasons may be different for each company, offshoring is becoming more and more mainstream and as this happens, the increase in Russian Translation demand has also been consistent. It’s worth mentioning here that offshoring has been going on for years, if not decades and is partially driven by the need for companies to sell their goods in foreign markets. Since the sudden and significant growth in outsourcing began, several important changes in the business environment in the late 1990s facilitated the emergence and rapid growth of services offshoring, including the offshoring of activities with significant engineering and medical content. Some examples include Medical Translation professionals, Electrical Engineers, Aerospace Engineers and more. These changes have been made possible due to advances in information technology, an increase in the demand for certain types of technical skills, and the emergence of appropriately skilled, low-wage workforces in India, China, and elsewhere.

It’s also important to note that the debate has been going on since at least February 2003 when the cover of Business Week asked, “Is your job next?” Later, the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Small Business held a hearing called “The globalization of white-collar jobs: Can America lose these jobs and still prosper?” Even today, the dialogue continues over the loss of jobs. Thinking back almost 20-years, I remember the names of many people who publicly denounced offshoring and the results that it would have. Others counter that offshoring is a benign trend that enables U.S.-based companies and entrepreneurs to develop and market innovations more quickly and cost effectively.

Should Language Translators Be Concerned?
While it appears that domestically located language translation agencies are profiting at the expense of the American workforce, several language translation trade associations are offering different opinions. If the offshoring trend continues, it is highly likely that more and more translators and interpreters jobs will be exported to low price markets. The fear surrounding offshoring and its effects on the translation industry was repeated in a study conducted by a German Translation service. Today, most translation workers in developed countries are concerned about the jobs that the U.S. has lost to the developing world. If the US continues to lose its ability to manufacture many of the cutting-edge products it invented, then they will also lose their ability to produce people with strong Language Translation, Science and Engineering backgrounds. Consequently, while the US is losing medical and engineering services, it is also losing translation jobs but at a much slower rate.

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