Watching your clients advertise for (cheaper) translators

Preston Decker wrote:

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Would I be able to find actual information on Baidu, and not a list of advertisements, if Baidu had to compete directly against Google? I’m betting yes.

Preston Decker wrote:

So to me, the biggest problem in the CN-EN pair (and I think this is where a lot of the comparative lack of high-end demand comes from) is that we are essentially missing a large chunk of what should be our primary client base. Someone please correct me if I’m wrong, but my impression is that there is a far higher percentage of German or French companies willing to pay high into English rates than Chinese companies. For CN>EN, a few of the industry leaders in China have realized that they need professionally done translations and are willing to pay high rates. Then there’s a smaller segment of mid-level companies that want native English on their websites, and are willing to pay the bare minimum needed to get a "decent" translator, and then a vast majority of companies that either can't afford/don't want anything other than Chinglish on their websites or don't know enough to know that this is exactly what they're getting.

Balasubramaniam L. wrote:



I think your reading of the tea leaves is essentially correct – the client base for Chinese to English translations is weak. It is so with Hindi to English translations too. The real market is in the other direction - from English to Hindi, and perhaps from English to Chinese.

The reason is obvious – today China is the best performing economy in the world and everyone is keen to sell there. So the major translation requirement is from English to Chinese rather than in the other direction.

From what little I know of China, most of the manufacturing done there is owned by foreign companies who use China as a base for manufacturing to take advantage of cheap wages there. Since these are not Chinese companies, they generate much less original Chinese material requiring translation into English. And the main market for the products they manufacture is China itself, and so the need for Chinese to English translation is again very limited.

And I feel this situation is only going to worsen, as China is making a conscious shift from being an export-oriented nation vulnerable to external economic factors, to one that is more self-sufficient. In other words, it is developing its own internal markets, and is consuming a lot more of the high-end products that are being manufactured there, both by foreign companies, as well as by its own indigenous companies.

This has become socially important too, as the Chinese are becoming increasingly affluent and restive about the tight control exercised by the government over their lives. The government there is feeling the need to relax control to avoid a social revolution and a challenge to their authority. This also makes prudent economic policy, as China cannot expect to grow at 10% a year indefinitely.

These economic and social factors too could have a possible bearing on the slump in the Chinese to English translation market – it seems to be a fragile market which already may have peaked a few years ago, as the export-oriented Chinese companies now turn more and more inward towards China itself for the sale of their products.

[Edited at 2015-02-06 03:15 GMT]