A Marketer’s Life

Over the past two decades, translation firms have experienced a sharp increase in growth that stems from the increase from offshoring. 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 Translation 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. With no let up in this trend expected, a growing number of academia, lawmakers, economists and trade groups are spending more to research the trend.

Can Translation Jobs Be Outsourced?
In general, offshoring revolves around the costs associated with transferring control of the labor process to an external entity in another country. In an interview with The New York Times, an owner of a Portuguese Document Translation 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.” Work is usually offshored in order to save money. In fact, each dollar of spending on business services that moves offshore, U.S. companies save 58 cents, mainly in wages. 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. At a time when jobs demanding labor skills are being exported to foreign countries, the demand for interpretation and Russian Translation workers is solid and may even be growing. However, we think it is important for everyone to recall that offshoring is driven my global trade initiatives and helps facilitate the development of world economies. 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.

As we move into a new decade, the same debate will be following us as offshoring moves into the fields of engineering and medicine the same way it entered the manufacturing sector of the US economy almost 20-years ago. A number of groups and prominent individuals have long argued that offshoring hurts U.S. workers and the U.S. economy. However, others believe that offshoring creates value for the U.S. economy by creating value for U.S. companies and freeing U.S. resources for activities with more value added.

Can Offshoring Hurt Translation Firms Too?
While translations companies located in the US have long suggested that offshoring has helped their businesses, a growing number of language translation trade associations are dismissing these claims. It is more than likely that at the current pace of offshoring, more translation companies and translator jobs will be located outside of the United States. Furthermore, a German Translation company reports that continued offshoring puts U.S. leadership in science and engineering is now at risk as well as translation services. With every day, it seems that a growing number of translators and interpreters become increasing concerned about jobs being lost to third world countries. 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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