Global Marketplace Trends And Translation

The global market is gradually shifting its axis from developed countries like U.S.A., Europe to countries in Asia and Africa. The trend is very pronounced in industries like medical and pharmaceuticals where the focus is rapidly moving to Asia and experts believe that the latter would become the largest market for medicines in the near future. MNCs are increasingly inclined to set up more research and development facilities and conduct more clinical trials in certain Asia countries according to a survey by PwC. Africa is a sleeping giant at present and business growth is expected come in fast pace in future.
The above trend forebodes well for translators as both the continents have myriad of languages in use. The demand will not be just translation with English as source or target language but also other combinations like Spanish/Chinese, German/Korean, and French/Korean, Italian/Hindi etc. as well.
Similarly the opportunities in Africa are huge. Although there are hundreds of local languages spoken in Africa, they are still not very well developed. Business is predominantly conducted in English, French, Portuguese and Arabic at present. Hence in the immediate future translation in these language pairs viz. English/French, French/Arabic etc are expected to be in demand. Over a period of time translation from / into the other African languages will also be required.
According to a Commonsense Advisory survey on global translation companies, the top 25 companies are reporting solid growth in revenues through localization, translation, internationalization business. Each year they are reporting higher revenues than previous year as well as the list is becoming more global. The top 25 list includes language service providers from diverse range of countries like U.S., UK, Switzerland, China, Finland, France, Ireland, Japan, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Spain and Sweden.
This growth augurs well for the future of both in house translators as well as freelancers. Some of the reasons for this globalization trend include decoupling of the world economy from the U.S. economy. As the global GDP share shifts from US and other European to lesser known countries like Brazil, China, India, Russia, Korea etc. there is bound to be more business interaction by these countries with the rest of the world. This will fuel more and more translation services from and into the languages spoken in these emerging economies.
Another reason for the growth of translation companies is multiculturalism which results in companies and governments striving to meet the needs of diverse population at home and abroad. It attracts lot of public funds as well as marketing dollars. Thus globalization forebodes well for translators and interpreters as discussed in another blog and they can look ahead with optimism.