In his Patent Translator’s Blog Steve Vlasta Vitek discusses the use of the abbreviation “LSP” and some others:

“What is an LSP? When I saw the term “an LSP” for the first time about a year ago on a translator’s blog, I did not know what it meant. Most people who read this blog will probably know that “an LSP” means a Language Service Provider, but that it is because most people who somehow end up on this blog are translators. Not many non-translators (or non-LSPers?) know what this English abbreviation means.

When I Googled LSP,  I got back a lot of interesting suggestions, such as Louisiana State Police, Latino Studies Program, Liskov Substitution Principle (whatever that means), Landowner Stewardship Program (whatever that means!), Legal Services Program (that sounds like a scam), Life Sciences Partner (an equity fund), Label Switched Path (that sounds like patentese, ergo it must be patentese)  … even a Lunar Soil Propellant (I am not even going to try to guess what it could mean), but nowhere in the first 10 (ten!) pages of helpful suggestions from Google was I able to discover that LSP can also mean a Language Service Provider. A website that explains what different abbreviations mean lists 35 possible meanings of the abbreviation LSP atabbreviations.com, but Language Service Provider is not listed.

LSPs used to be and sometime still are called translation agencies, which is a term that anybody can understand. But for some reasons, translation agencies do not want to be called that anymore. They started calling themselves LSPs and many if not most translators started imitating them and dutifully call them now LSPs too, possibly to demonstrate to the yet uninitiated public that they too belong to the club of insiders who are well versed in the professional lingo of the brave new translation industry.

I wonder, who was it who came up first with this abbreviation? I can only speculate why the industry started replacing the word “agency” with the abbreviation “LSP”. I think it was probably because “agency” sounds like a mediator, a facilitator, a broker, which is of course what they are, rather than a creator. A language service provider does not really provide the service in this case, it is the freelance translator or interpreter who provides the service, the LSP buys and then the sells the service for a profit. So the new term was probably designed to obscure the reality, sort of like when the Blackwater Corporation changed its name to “Xe” (which is pronounced “zee” in English but differently in other languages).” Read  more

See: Patent Translator’s Blog