International businesses need translation in many different parts of their companies. They require language support for their global websites, marketing and sales collateral, support content, help forums, technical manuals, compliance documents, and human resources materials. As a result, several different departments end up buying language services from diverse suppliers all over the world. But does this make the most sense, at a time when budgets are restricted, and companies need to do all they can to save money?

New data from independent market research firm Common Sense Advisory confirms that the opposite is true: centralization of language services can lead to lower costs and faster times to market for higher volumes of translated content. The firm surveyed 226 respondents at global businesses that purchase language-related services. Most of these organizations reported that their spending on translation had increased from 2010 to 2011, in spite of global economic woes.

“Survey respondents predicted that 25% of their projects will be one million words or more by 2012,” points out Rebecca Ray, senior analyst at Common Sense Advisory, and lead author of the study. “Projects of this size typically include 15 or more languages. Since so many translation tasks are outsourced, international businesses find themselves faced with huge scalability challenges and an almost complete dependency on their translation providers.”

Key findings detailed in “Translation Performance Metrics” include:

• The cost of translation is minuscule compared to the revenue it can generate. Almost all firms reported that their cost of translation was far below 1% of total revenue.

• Key vertical industries are increasing spend on language services. Manufacturing, financial services and insurance, and health care all grew by more than 25%. Software and related services expanded by 18%.

• Size matters for language service budgets. Most organizations expected their spending levels to increase from 2010 to 2011. Companies with the highest revenue – US$10 billion or more – predicted the highest percentage increase (31.13%).

• Buyers of language services are counting on vendors to resolve scalability challenges. As clients continue to spend the majority of their translation budgets on outsourced services, they expect providers to help stretch their budgets to cover more languages and more content. They are also seeking support from vendor partners for centralization initiatives, project management, linguistic quality programs, localization engineering, machine translation (MT) integration, training, and community building.

• Project size and number of languages are trending up. Big projects (one million words or more) grew across almost all industries, regardless of content type. Survey respondents predicted that 25% of their projects would be one million words or more by 2012. Projects of 10,000 words or less in 2009 averaged 16 languages; in 2012, they were predicted to reach 20.
• Average turnaround time is one week or less. Sixty percent of respondents stated that their average turnaround time was up to a week, with the largest group claiming two days or less. More.

See: Common Sense Advisory