Translation Services: Evolving Trends in India and the world

The translation industry is a fast-growing service sector both in terms of volume and turnover. This is particularly true in India, where the need to bridge the language divide created by a host of different languages spoken in various parts of the country has contributed significantly to its growth. Translation services have also gained importance in a number of industries and companies of all sizes due to an increase in international business, as well as growing sophistication of industrial products, leading to a greater volume of documentation in languages of the target countries. The changes in demand have had a major impact on the translation companies, which now bear a more systematic and industrialized outlook. There has been a shift towards large language service providers, full document production and automation. The translation market has remained very fragmented, but that large translation companies are quickly gaining in number and size. Over the past 25 years, the sheer number of languages per project has led to the creation of translation companies which expertise in several different languages of the world and not just one or two languages. Similarly the market share of self employed freelancers working directly with clients will drop significantly the main cause being the growing number of languages requested for each project, a requirement rarely met by a freelancer specializing in one or two languages.

Another interesting recent phenomenon in the Indian context is the competition received by the countries in Eastern Europe, Argentina, China, Philippines etc in terms of lower cost of operation. As a result, companies in India now face the challenge of having to offer competitive pricing to beat the competition offered by these alternative low cost destinations. In a world of tougher competition and lower margins, the need for operational efficiency becomes crucial. As a result, a translation company India providing well-organized, efficient processes and experienced staff at the lowest possible price will prevail.

Most translation companies in India have started to realize the need and advantages of integrating CAT tools into their workflow and that the requirements for language professionals wanting to enter the job market have changed significantly. As for characteristics of the translation industry as a whole, they have remained largely unexplored. Various social, economic and cultural issues prevailing in the country have also influenced translation services offered by the translation companies to a great extent.

As a result, translation workflow in the biggest translation companies has changed and has become more technology-driven over the years. As a result, several aspects of the translation service are affected such as the communication with clients and other translators, the speed and amount of information that can be retrieved and the way texts are created and handled. In this setting, translators are required to acquire new skills to remain competitive in the market. This need is already being addressed by the translation companies in the way they offer their services and recruit translators for and project managers for the job. But there is considerably ess support for other language-related professions that have proliferated, most notably that of project manager. The future of the translation industry will continue to be strongly influenced by advances in technology. The Internet bandwidth will increase, hardware costs will continue to fall while performance increases and subscription to server-based software will make translation tools accessible to an even broader audience. All this will give rise to borderless virtual translation companies. Web services that will fully automate quoting and file handling will reduce the project management burden, allowing more resources for quality assurance. This will be just a step away from direct web translation in which translators will no longer be sent any files, they will just log on to a web application and translate directly from the web with full support of the required tools, such as spell checking, concordances, automatic terminology detection, and translation memories. Major translation companies in India seem to be aware of this fact and are responding to the changing needs of the market which is following the trends observable in other markets around the globe.