EUATC makes predictions: Translation Market 2006-2010

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The European Union of Associations of Translation Companies (EUATC) has recently published papers from its 2nd International Conference. Amongst them is an interesting document outlining the development of translation markets in Europe.

According to Fernand Boucau, president of BQTA, former president of EUATC and author of the document, the European Translation market has profited and will, at least for the coming years, continue to profit from the growing international trade. The market also benefits from "the widespread trend towards the protect ion culture, and therefore languages, for written documents."

Basing his assumptions on Common Sense Advisory's and other figures, the author expects an annual growth of 5 percent for translation services, roughly corresponding to the growth in international trade in general.

The EUATC assumes the share of European companies in the international translation industry is close to 48 percent. However, the large companies are to dominate the market, their growth, mainly through acquisition of smaller languiage service providers, "outstripping that of the global market". Compared to the figures of 2005, the 15 leading companies in the translation market grew their turnover by about 20% to close to 1.5b US$ in 2006.

The 15 largest companies in the sector are responsible for close to 12 percent of the total turnover. Another 13% of the global market is owned by som 3100 translation companies. The remaining 75% are the domain of roughly 200.000 freelancers. For 2006, the estimate of the total market is 12.46 billion US Dollar or 9.5 billion Euro.

A last interesting conclusion made by the author is that the share of freelancers, currently around 75% of the global turnover is to decrease to 60-70%. That is mainly attributed to the fact that projects become more multilingual and thus need to be handled by project managing agencies.

In general the outlook is not too bad. Although the figures presented by the EUATC are slightly less positive than those of Common Sense Advisory (CSA assumes a general annual growth of 7.5 percent), the organization nonetheless expects a stable growth of 5% p.a. for the translation sector and argues that this growth will continue until the end of the decade.

By 2010/12 a general slowdown of the growth in international trade is expected in turn having its effect on the translation sector. "In the event of a slow down in the growth of international trade, the translation industry will be affected, but to a lesser extent."

Most importantly, however, is the fact that the author concludes that translation does still not have a positive image. "Clients see it more as a cost than as an investment". Boucau's advise: "We must educate the clients". A similar assumption was recently made by John Yunker, CEO of bytelevelresearch and author of Global By Design. In his blog he recently stated that Chinese agency offerings "reinforce the idea that translation is a commodity business. It isn't. Translation is as much of an art as it is a science."

sources: EUATC, Global By Design

Related: Common Sense Advisory's Translation Market 2007 Outlook