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How Will Current Trends in Offshoring Influence Translation Jobs?

July 12th, 2010 Guest No comments

It’s a trend that everyone knows. Many of America’s top jobs are moving offshore. Which jobs are most likely to be hit by “offshoring”?. In the United States, demand is particularly good for native speakers of Portuguese, Japanese, German, Spanish, Russian and several others. But while demand for services like Chinese Interpretation is increasing, it is at the cost of industrialized nations that are experiencing large losses in the number of high-skill service jobs that are being relocated to developing nations. With no let up in this trend expected, a growing number of academia, lawmakers, economists and trade groups are spending more to research the trend.

Translation Jobs in Exchange For Other High Skilled Service Jobs
Offshoring is a type of outsourcing. In an interview with The New York Times, an owner of a Portuguese Document Translation agency stated, “Outsourcing appears to work contrary to the claim that free trade will create the jobs of tomorrow in America when high-tech or high paying white-collar jobs are transferred to or created in foreign countries.” Frequently, work is offshored in order to reduce labor expenses. It’s important to realize too that there may be other issues that cause companies to engage in an offshoring initiative. For example, some companies may need to offshore to meet new regulations and others might offshore to be closer to new markets. Even though the reasons may be different for each company, offshoring is becoming more and more mainstream and as this happens, the increase in Russian Interpretation demand has also been consistent. In addition, it’s important to point out that offshoring is a decades-long trend that is driven by the expansion of international trade in goods. Since the sudden and significant growth in outsourcing began, several important changes in the business environment in the late 1990s facilitated the emergence and rapid growth of services offshoring, including the offshoring of activities with significant engineering and medical content. Some examples include Medical Translation professionals, Electrical Engineers, Aerospace Engineers and more. These changes have been made possible due to advances in information technology, an increase in the demand for certain types of technical skills, and the emergence of appropriately skilled, low-wage workforces in India, China, and elsewhere.

As we journey forth into a new decade, we will continue to hear politicians, economists and victims of job losses criticize the lack of action taken to thwart offshoring. In addition, we should expect the trend to enter into the field of engineering and medicine the same way it entered the US manufacturing sector. You can probably still recall the names of some of the first people who stood up against offshoring and predict it results on the U.S. economy. Yet pandering to protectionism would be wrong. Many people believe that money spent to buy services abroad is lost to the U.S. economy, but such views are easily disproved. Companies move their business services offshore because they can make more money, which means that wealth is created for the United States as well as for the country receiving the jobs.

What’s Stopping Language Translation Agencies From Being Offshored?
While it appears that domestically located language translation agencies are profiting at the expense of the American workforce, several language translation trade associations are offering different opinions. As the trend toward continued outsourcing continues, it appears likely that at some point the jobs of translators will also be moved to third world markets. In fact, a German Translation organization recently produced a report that argues that long-term U.S. leadership in science and engineering is now at risk. Today, most translation workers in developed countries are concerned about the jobs that the U.S. has lost to the developing world. If the US continues to outsource development and manufacturing work to specialists abroad, this will result: in a damaging deterioration in the collective capabilities that serve high tech which includes translation services. This will undoubtedly lead to a long-term decline in job losses for professionals in the language translation industry.