The Shape of the Translation Industry

Marla Schulman, President
Schreiber Translations, Inc.

As those of us in this business know all too well, the translation industry is little known and not at all recognized in the United States. Whenever I meet new people, whether in a social or professional setting, and the subject of what I do comes up, I ask them to give me the names of three translation companies. Despite the fact that there are more than 3000 such companies in the U.S., I have not yet met someone who can name even one. Yet what is even more interesting is that as soon as they start thinking about it, they invariably come up with one of two responses – "Of course! There must be a huge demand for that kind of service," or "You know, actually, I believe my wife (brother/friend/partner etc.) just used such a service." There is a large demand for translation services, which by all accounts is growing, but for various reasons translation is a profession still in its infancy as an industry. This article will seek to explain the current makeup of the industry in this country as well as try to answer the question of why it is so under recognized.

The industry is made up of many thousands of individual translators as well as, as was stated above, more than 3000 companies. Individual translators come from a wide variety of backgrounds. Some have actual translation training or education under their belt, but most do not. What most do have is experience. Very often they have had formal language training and then because of this training some exposure to translation. One example is a position with a company where their language skills were taken advantage of to translate business correspondence or other similar materials. Another example is a personal interest in developing their language and translation skills while pursuing other technical careers. Yet another group is made up of non-native speakers of English who have come here from other countries and are able to combine their expertise related to prior careers as doctors, engineers, or scientists with their language skills to create a lucrative career for themselves. It is all of these individuals who perform the actual translation work and they are divided into three main groups – in-house translators, fulltime freelance translators and part-time freelance translators.

In-house translators, or translators who work for a company fulltime doing nothing but translation are by far the smallest group. These translators work for multinational corporations, companies doing international work, the U.S. Government or for translation companies themselves. There aren't many companies or organizations that do handle translations in-house and thus the number in this group is limited. Further, according to a recent survey conducted by the American Translators Association, these individuals who work in the private sector earn slightly less than do freelance translators, while those that work for the Government earn a good bit less.

Fulltime freelance translators is a slightly harder category to define because very few work exactly 40 hours or thereabouts a week. The nature of a freelance translation career is such that one can experience periods of feast or famine, or times when one simply chooses to take on less or more of a load than they normally handle. What I mean by fulltime freelancers are those who don't have another career or profession, but whose sole means of income is translation work. Part-time freelance translators are those who have other sources of professional income and do translation work "on the side". Many such translators have language-related careers, such as broadcasters at the Voice of America, in-house translators, bilingual assistants, etc. Freelance translators in general have varied sources of work. Many have a combination of "direct" clients as well as translation company clients and some have only one kind or the other.

All individual translators, at one time or another, come into contact with a translation company. What exactly is a translation company? I would submit that it is an incorporated (or otherwise legally formed) entity providing translation services. Translation companies in the U.S. that meet this criterion fall into three main categories. Note that not included in these categories is a somewhat new and still developing group of translation providers whose success is yet to be determined and consists of online-only translation companies.

The first category is that of very small, under three-employee companies that specialize in one or a few languages only. This can include an individual translator who is incorporated for business reasons only, but operates very much as a non-incorporated freelance translator. The next category is not truly a category of translation companies because it refers to companies whose core business is other than translation, but who also provide translation services. Common examples are international marketing firms, advertising agencies, or business consulting services.

The third category is perhaps the biggest one and is made up of "typical" translation companies. These are companies who provide translation and translation-related services in all languages. Granted their understanding of what providing services in "all languages" means differs – some offer 50, some 100 and some 150 languages, but the point is that these are companies who provide services in the most commonly translated languages and most of whom probably have the means and the desire to at least attempt and provide services in any language requested of them. I include in this category companies who also offer either language training or localization services in addition to translation because these services are so closely tied together and because the majority of this kind of translation company now offers localization services or at least claims to. Business models differ slightly but for the most part are based on some combination of work handled by in-house staff and work handled by freelancers. Some companies farm out all translations and handle all editing and quality control in-house, while some handle much of the translation in-house and still others send out everything. Very few of this kind of company acts strictly as an agent, farming out documents for translation and then returning them to clients without some form of editing or quality control.

These are companies that are fairly small by business standards, generally with under 50 employees and average annual revenues of less than about $25 million. Competition among this group is extremely fierce and part of their challenge is illustrated by the fact that many call the same large corporate clients their own – it would be interesting to see exactly how many of them list a particular company, such as Marriott, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, MCI WorldCom etc. on their client roster. Large corporations do not generally have centralized translation operations and instead leave this kind of purchasing to those individuals who need it, which often means that translation services get purchased locally or regionally.

What is so very unusual though is that with most other professional service industries such as advertising, printing, or legal services, for example, where you find categories similar to those listed above, there is also another category that is made up of many much larger, multi-million dollar companies. In the case of translation services there is one for certain, perhaps two or three such companies. There were thoughts towards the end of the nineties that mergers and acquisitions fueled by the booming high-tech economy and the link between localization and translation would change this landscape, but understandably things seemed to have quieted down on this front.

I will not venture to ask the question of why this is so and I will certainly not attempt to answer it here. But I do believe that this is part of the explanation as to why this industry receives so little recognition and appreciation. Another reason is the lack of regulation in this country for these services. This deficiency not only hurts the industry's reputation but also means that truly detailed information about its makeup is alarmingly unavailable. Yet another reason the profession is under-appreciated is that most common reason of all for the under-appreciation of things and that is ignorance. People in the U.S. simply do not understand the skills, talent and expertise required to provide professional translation services. Alas, despite this condition the profession thrives in its own way and carries forward and overwhelmingly those of us that are involved in it are driven first and foremost by our love of language and our desire to further communication among people everywhere.