According to new research by Common Sense Advisory the price of translation and localization services has dropped. This comes as the net result of global supply, advances in technology, economic troubles, and more aggressive buyers.
Common Sense Advisory based these findings on a detailed global survey of 651 language service providers (translation firms) and freelancers in 75 countries about their pricing structures, processes, and customer bases.
Key survey findings include:
Demand is up, but price is down. While demand for language services has continued to grow (at a rate of over 13% per year), for the most part the price of translation and localization services has dropped.Automation benefits buyers. Businesses can obtain substantial cost savings by working with translation providers that partially automate the translation process. The research found that most providers discount the per word price by as much as 48% when using translation memory to process previously translated text. Machine translation with human post-editing generates even larger savings.
Less than half give discounts. Price anxiety remains a big concern among suppliers. Forty-two percent of the respondents give some type of discount, based on customer loyalty, frequency, or volume. Respondents overwhelmingly stated that they face price pressure and client sensitivity driven by competition from large LSPs and low-cost (and sometimes unqualified) translators both in their home markets and abroad.
See: Release-news
Share an article »
ProZ.com blog »
United States
Local time: 21:22
Portuguese to English
+ ...
Could you post a link to the Common Sense Advisory article, please?
Thailand
Local time: 08:22
English to Thai
+ ...
Now we are about to go out of the hamburger crisis where many jobless people start to be (freelance) translator. At the same time, translation demands drop due to lower economic activities in recent days. I hope economic recession will end quickly for a better business cycle of us the translators.
Best regards,
Soonthon Lupkitaro
France
Local time: 03:22
English to French
+ ...
The link is mentioned in Romina's news as "source", in fact it's a press release made available by CSA: http://www.release-news.com/index.php/automotive/20806-translation-and-localization-industry-pricing-survey-reveals-while-demand-is-up-prices-are-down.html
I was also interested in reading more about this ... See more
The link is mentioned in Romina's news as "source", in fact it's a press release made available by CSA: http://www.release-news.com/index.php/automotive/20806-translation-and-localization-industry-pricing-survey-reveals-while-demand-is-up-prices-are-down.html
I was also interested in reading more about this and checked: it seems the whole study is available only to CSA members: http://www.commonsenseadvisory.com/Research/Report_Abstracts/100731_R_Translation_Pricing/tabid/2047/Default.aspx ▲ Collapse
Germany
Local time: 03:22
Member (2004)
English to German
+ ...
.
English to Italian
+ ...
In what way are these findings new let alone surprising?
.
That is probably why it is called "Common Sense Advisory"
[Modificato alle 2010-08-14 19:33 GMT]
Local time: 03:22
English to Italian
+ ...
Now we are about to go out of the hamburger crisis where many jobless people start to be (freelance) translator. At the same time, translation demands drop due to lower economic activities in recent days. I hope economic recession will end quickly for a better business cycle of us the translators.
Best regards,
Soonthon Lupkitaro
If you read the articles, you will see that translation demand has not dropped (it may have slowed a little during the crisis but now is stronger than before the crisis). What has dropped are prices as companies have aggressively tried (and managed) to cut their costs during the crisis. This is not just translations, it concerns IT, advertising, in-house salaries, etc. Of course this is a general trend, it doesn't mean that all translators earn less than before.
Belgium
Local time: 03:22
English to Dutch
+ ...
When I read discussions on Proz I get the impression many, most if not all qualified translators jointly stick to their pricing no matter what and that's a good thing. However, if - as the article states - there's a decline in prices buyers are willing to pay due to automation and machine translation, how... See more
When I read discussions on Proz I get the impression many, most if not all qualified translators jointly stick to their pricing no matter what and that's a good thing. However, if - as the article states - there's a decline in prices buyers are willing to pay due to automation and machine translation, how do qualified translators respond in order to survive/make a living? ▲ Collapse
Netherlands
Local time: 03:22
Dutch to Romanian
+ ...
I wonder how this affects professional translators with a relevant degree, not the jobless people Soonthon mentioned as I assume they will not find problems in lowering their prices.
When I read discussions on Proz I get the impression many, most if not all qualified translators jointly stick to their pricing no matter what and that's a good thing. However, if - as the article states - there's a decline in prices buyers are willing to pay due to automation and machine translation, how do qualified translators respond in order to survive/make a living?
Non-translators or non-linguists don't know usually what translations are. Here they come with the idea that machine translations are good enough and... free. What we, as translators should do, is to publish, to write, to communicate them all that we can add value to the target text, we can manage to transform it into a marketing solution (when the client is marketing products, for example). And we can do that, because most of us are enough creative.
The general idea about translations should be changed, because many of them there, our potential clients, think that translation is only about replacing words and they could certainly do that with a good dictionary and more free time. Well, should we stop talking about prices and crisis and start marketing our business in a different way?
A first step i made... I am working part time in an office and I was given an Italian 100 words text to "translate". I told my supervisor (not a translator) I don't know Italian. Then he said that he only needs the general meaning and asked me to translate it in Google Translate. It took me 5 seconds to "translate" the text into English, and 5 minutes to add some illogical structures in the translated text (more of "the", illogical "to"-s and "into"-s, etc.) After reading the already "proofread translation", my supervisor sent an email to his old friend, who spent several years in Italy and got the TRANSLATION back. I have no idea if i broke any rules, if so, please let me know and I won't do it again and probably i will edit my post
Local time: 03:22
English to Italian
+ ...
However, if - as the article states - there's a decline in prices buyers are willing to pay due to automation and machine translation, how do qualified translators respond in order to survive/make a living?
This is not the only reason, however CAT tools increase productivity, so this is supposed to compensate for the discounts (we could only complain that we may not profit from this increase in productivity...). As for machine translation this might affect the low end of the market but definitely not the high end (where clients check the quality of their translations).
Having said this, another reason for prices going down is that companies, in trying to cut prices have taken advantage of the competition to try new LSP. Now, sometimes they have realized the quality was lower and have come back to their previous LSP, but sometimes they have found new LSP that were at least as good but "less expensive". This is a problem that the translation community doesn't (like to) talk about. Some of the high rate LSP/translators did not have a quality that was up to their prices, and were lucky enough that their clients didn't take the time to go and see the competition. Now as long as things go well this goes on, but when things turn bad, these companies/people are the most "in danger"...
As Warren Buffet said "Only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked..."
[Modificato alle 2010-08-15 08:35 GMT]
Netherlands
Local time: 03:22
Member (2006)
English to Afrikaans
+ ...
Less than half give discounts. Price anxiety remains a big concern among suppliers. Forty-two percent of the respondents give some type of discount, based on customer loyalty, frequency, or volume. Respondents overwhelmingly stated that they face price pressure and client sensitivity driven by competition from large LSPs and low-cost (and sometimes unqualified) translators both in their home markets and abroad.
I find it interesting that they regard discount schemes as a symptom of prince anxiety and not merely as a competitive advantage generating mechanism that is a normal part of any business.
To report site rules violations or get help, contact a site moderator:
You can also contact site staff by submitting a support request »
This discussion can also be accessed via the ProZ.com forum pages.