The world is currently experiencing a financial and economic crisis of proportions unseen in many decades. All sectors of he economy are taking a hit and so is the Translation Industry. From my personal experience, I see that a number of agencies I have been working with for years are struggling; some of them handle their limited projects only with their internal translators and a few of them are even thinking of going out of business. Freelancers, however, are better positioned in this crisis compared to agencies. Independent translators need limited resources (bank loans, premises, equipment and other running costs) to provide their services and so they can survive even a severe drop in their work volume. On the other hand, agencies have to bear very high (and increasing) running costs that shape their pricing policy and, ultimately, make them unappealing to prospective clients.
In light of the crisis, translation buyers are looking to cut down on their expenses but also maintain a certain level of quality. In the past, those clients had sufficient income and cash flows in order to outsource their projects to another company with a relatively high cost. Nowadays, professional and reliable freelancers prove to be a good alternative for them, for two reasons:
1) Low cost. Freelancers charge considerably less than agencies, for the above mentioned and many other reasons.
2) The volume that freelancers can handle and the quality level they can offer increases every day, what with all the new QA tools, translation memories, cloud shared content, automatic translation, dictionaries …you name it.
Of course, the crisis does not hit all companies in the market. Reports suggest that the largest Language Service Providers like Lionbridge, Thebigword and SDL, are actually recording increase in profits and number of translation orders. This is partly due to the fact that ‘blue-chip’ corporations -which are the ones with the greatest translation needs- do not trust their work on freelancers, mainly due to volume and project management considerations. Instead, they prefer to outsource their projects to ‘one stop shops’ with proven record and large marketing campaigns.
This leads us to the preliminary conclusion that those that can withstand or even benefit from the crisis are freelancers and large translation companies. At the moment, prospects don’t look good for mid-size and smaller agencies. Time will show us if this is definite or just a sign of the times. Until then, we, as freelancers, should try to improve the services we offer and invest in our profession in every possible way; because the crisis will be over sooner or later and we do not want to find ourselves against the wall.
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