Boom in Business, Boost for Translation

In a span of few years, from being an inconsequential back-burner area, translation has leapfrogged as a multi-billion-dollar industry. Companies, brands, and countries are now diving in this pool of skills, resources and tools to accelerate the transfer of knowledge, business and technology in a seamless way as boundaries between brands, cultures, and economic zones dissolve further.

Today, the very area of interpretation, translation, and localization (software, apps, websites, code, manuals etc.) totals up revenues of around $37 billion annually. On the surface, this is happening because more and more businesses are crossing borders and reaching out to new segments and markets for expansion of existing offerings and exploration of new ones.

This necessitates that adequate language translation services in local language and understanding of relevant culture frames. This also extends into areas like regulation, compliance related documentation, patents or other legal work.

However, India is gaining from both this local impetus of translation and the branching out of global outsourcing phenomenon. India has made its roots deep enough in the IT part of the outsourcing business, but now the same is trickling down for translation back-end processes as well. This brings to fore an often forgotten but crucial aspect of translation agencies – the translation services in India.

This is precisely where the country is reaping its strengths in servicing outsourcers thanks to a strong hand in technology and skilled resource pool. This is where it is leveraging a multi-lingual population and especially, a young breed of English and foreign-language-proficient people.

On one hand, translation companies are using this pool and expertise to translate documents, creating literature, scientific and pharma info, processes, knowledge, and technology into Indian languages. On the other hand, companies based abroad are using the country’s strengths built during the IT outsourcing phase to get an affordable and quality-oriented set of services for their global needs. This covers many verticals. Pharma companies are leveraging this service industry for compliance, patents, and medically-sensitive translations.

IT vendors and software makers are converting software interfaces, user and training manuals, labels and Meta data with the use of such services.

Advantageous labor costs, a service industry orientation, well-established infrastructure, technology orientation and competencies built during the BPO and IT outsourcing peaks are pushing India ahead in this industry.

The ripe pool of resources is being further enriched with new and qualified professionals that many universities and language institutes are offering every year. With such a portfolio of tools, service standards, language specialists and translators; India with its language translation services edge, is coming up strongly on the global translation map.

A reliable and strong translation company here can typically cover a wide span of services and specializations. They can be delivering legal, financial, regulation-related, documentation services, medical translation or IT-related translation.

The range of translation services in India can cover anything from translation, interpretation, subtitling, memory databases, machine tools, and localisation services to bigger aspects like project supervision, management of file formats and locations, single database packaging of software, memory and content management and even quality reviews.

This is a prolific time for services in translation realm and India is at the forefront of this surging wave. It’s past (colonial influence and English’s importance in education), recent present (IT outsourcing phases) and future (bigger participation in geopolitics and global economy) are working in tandem to pushing its place up ahead in the language translation services domain.

The industry is certainly bound to grow further and India can carve its own distinct place here with a service-orientation as always.

I am an Expert in the medium of translation & language services. I have working knowledge in documents translation, conduct Multilingual media research, and provide Multilingual E-mail Support.