March 29, 2010

Opportuny For Translation Agencies Could Be Increasing

It’s a trend that everyone knows. Many of America’s top jobs are moving offshore. Which jobs are most likely to be hit by “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. Unfortunately, the trend that drives the demand for Chinese Translation services is often at the cost of workers in industrialized nations who are at risk of being replaced and having their jobs relocated to developing nations. 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?
Offshoring is a type of outsourcing. One Portuguese Translation worker believes that offshoring is “just another process of economic restructuring”, with which the U.S. economy is well acquainted and that can and frequently do result in job losses. Firms primarily engage in offshoring as a means to reduce their labor costs and add profit to their bottom line. It’s important to realize too that there may be other issues that cause companies to engage in an offshoring initiative. For example, some companies may need to offshore to meet new regulations and others might offshore to be closer to new markets. Interestingly enough, while skilled service jobs are being relocated to third world countries the demand for Russian Interpretation services appears to be consistent and perhaps even growing. 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.

Criticism of offshoring and the presumed “hollowing out” of the U.S. engineering and medical workforces are reminiscent of the debates of 20 years ago about U.S. standing in international trade and manufacturing industries. Thinking back almost 20-years, I remember the names of many people who publicly denounced offshoring and the results that it would have. However, many make the argument that because the United States is aging, the country will need 5 percent, or 15.6 million, more workers by 2015 to maintain both its current ratio of workers to the total population and its living standards. By 2015, despite current fears about job losses as a result of offshoring, the U.S. economy will need more, not fewer, workers. Offshoring is one way to meet that need.

Should Language Translators Be Concerned?
But even as translation firms have profited at the expense of American workers, their trade associations have grown doubtful about many of the promises made concerning free trade. 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. This notion that more highly skilled positions are likely to leave are echoed in research studies produced by a German Translation Agency that also believes that science and engineering jobs are at great risk too. 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 outsource development and manufacturing work to specialists abroad, this will result: in a damaging deterioration in the collective capabilities that serve high tech which includes translation services. The results will then be a deterioration of translation services within the United States.

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