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How Does Exporting Skilled Service Jobs Impact Translation Careers?
You would have to be blind to not see that many types of jobs have left America. But while this trend has been visible for at least a decade, translation firms are experiencing an increase in demand.. In the United States, demand is particularly good for native speakers of Portuguese, Japanese, German, Spanish, Russian and several others. Yet while Chinese Translation and interpretation workers can rest easily for a moment, the employment status of other skilled service workers is at great risk. In fact, large numbers of jobs requiring people with advanced skills are being relocated to underdeveloped nations. While the trend continues, it has gained the attention of the media and has sparked policy debate among academia, lawmakers, economists and various trade groups.
What Does Offshoring Mean to The Translation Industry?
Of course, offshoring is basically another name for 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.” The most common reason given to why a company invested in offshoring is to capitalize on labor expenses. Other times, the reasons for offshoring are strategic — to enter new markets, to tap talent currently unavailable domestically or to overcome regulations that prevent specific activities domestically. At a time when jobs demanding labor skills are being exported to foreign countries, the demand for interpretation and Russian to English Translation workers is solid and may even be growing. It’s worth mentioning here that offshoring has been going on for years, if not decades and is partially driven by the need for companies to sell their goods in foreign markets. 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 move into a new decade, the same debate will be following us as offshoring moves into the fields of engineering and medicine the same way it entered the manufacturing sector of the US economy almost 20-years ago. 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. However, many make the argument that because the United States is aging, the country will need 5 percent, or 15.6 million, more workers by 2015 to maintain both its current ratio of workers to the total population and its living standards. By 2015, despite current fears about job losses as a result of offshoring, the U.S. economy will need more, not fewer, workers. Offshoring is one way to meet that need.
Should Language Translators Be Concerned?
To a large extent, US translation companies have profited while fellow Americans are losing jobs in manufacturing, healthcare, engineering and more to offshoring. But despite this, some translator associations are beginning to dismiss the reported benefits. 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. Throughout developed nations, an increasing number of workers involved in the translation and interpretation service industry are increasingly worried about further offshoring moves. If the US continues to lose its ability to manufacture many of the cutting-edge products it invented, then they will also lose their ability to produce people with strong Language Translation, Science and Engineering backgrounds. Therefore, If the country continues to lose its engineering and medical services, then it will also experience a deterioration in its ability to provide translation services.
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