9.9.11

Off-shoring Translations?

When I started as a freelance translator and interpreter, the business was almost always strictly local. Even though working with languages obviously has an international dimension, back then in the early 1990’s we had no emails to receive files to be translated. We had to personally pick up the hard copy of the text and deliver a floppy disk and a printout afterwards.

However, times are changing and nowadays, our clients could be anywhere in the world. And some clients do search for their language service providers virtually anywhere, price apparently being the only criterion they consider.

Or would you search for a service provider on a web portal, where anybody can claim anything in their resume and the only reliable information is the price they charge?

I think I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t if what I needed to have done mattered. And if it didn’t matter, I probably wouldn’t have it done in the first place.

So yes, I checked out Proz.com and TranslatorsCafe and what have you. I even registered but never really felt comfortable to compete on lowest rates.

And then, one fine day, I received an email that a job for my language combination has just been published. I was of course curious, so I immediately logged in to check it out. I was not prepared for what I found however.

Obviously, I’m familiar with the idea of off-shoring or outsourcing manufacturing jobs to cheaper countries. I guess this is a trend we cannot stop let alone reverse. However, I’ve been under the impression that some jobs cannot be off-shored due to the fact that they are very closely tied with a particular market. I thought that for a translator with Slovak as a mother tongue, there would be no cheaper market than our own, so I would only have to compete with my fellow Slovak linguists living in cheaper parts of my country.

How wrong I was! The job posted for my language combination was by an Indian agency, asking for “best rates”. And this is something I find rather intriguing. I fully understand that clients want the cheapest possible price and that they think India is a country full with cheap service providers. So far, so good. However, I have serious doubts that there are many translators with Slovak as a mother tongue living in India, thus able to accept lower prices, due to lower costs of living. Consequently, any agency in India would have to find Slovaks living elsewhere in the world, Slovakia probably being the cheapest option anyway. So why would a potential client not contact a Slovak agency instead?

I cannot possibly imagine a scenario, where an Indian company can provide a better service and quality at a lower price than a local agency in Slovakia that has many translators in their database to start with.

I guess, I’ll never find out.

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