News agency stops outsourcing after having experienced problems

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Matthias Streitz, author for the online edition of the German weekly news magazine Spiegel, reported about severe effects of outsourcing experienced by the news agency Dow Jones. This had been the first instance of outsourcing the work of German journalists to a less expansive location, Streitz writes. Since 2004 the news agency Dow Jones had part of its German-language service translated in Budapest. The Hungarian partner Alfa Press employed about ten people to translate the English-languages texts of the Dow Jones service into German. Thus the Hungarians translated mainly short market reports und transferred them to the German news agency (formerly vwd).

At the time Dow Jones had decided to outsource the tasks to Hungary for financial reasons, where labour costs were, according to the company, "sometimes 20, sometimes even 50 percent" lower than in Germany and where shorter notice periods promised higher flexibility.

However, die work in Hungary was mainly done by career changers without a formal journalistic background, which led to continuing "quality issues", although towards the end the Alfa team consisted completely of German natives who lived in Budapest. According to Streitz these problems repetitively caused laborious editing to be done in Frankfurt. The English texts in the section "DJ Market Talk" will be again translated by experienced editors in Germany, Streitz writes.

Other news agencies like Reuters and AP, that also translate English texts provided by their parent services, have so far rejected to outsourcing the translation of these reports to other countries. Reuters, however, has its own international outsourcing project with much bigger dimensions. More than 600 positions have already been relocated from England and New York to Bangalore, India where enterprise data are acquired.

Source: Spiegel Online