yndigo

Pricing remains stable in translation industry

Business globalization research and consulting firm Common Sense Advisory just put out this press release, claiming that our $12 billion industry is not suffering from the sluggish economy. According to the press release, as globalization increases there is a growing demand for translation, so translators and translation services have not been forced to drop their prices as many other industries have.

Conversely, my very unscientific evidence — based on translator availability and unavailability — indicates that translators going into English are feeling the slowdown a bit more than those going out of it. This seems natural as U.S. corporations are scrambling to market products and services abroad so the first goal is to get their message into a variety of non-English languages.

Of course, the entire language marketplace is interconnected and as U.S. corporations globalize in ernest, government regulations, patents and internal corporate information needs to be understood for deals, mergers, licensing negotiations to proceed.