Hidden Cost of Translation to the UK Government, More Like £500 Million

An Applied Language Solutions press release, published last week, argues that the recently published BBC report underestimates the cost of translation and interpreting services to the UK Government.

Translation will not go away and will only grow due to the increasing immigration numbers and further expansion of the EU, the company informs. Instead, focus should be laid upon investment into technology: "We have been speaking to government, both nationally and locally, to begin a scheme to share a translation memory across all our public sector customers and are just trying to get authorities to agree to it to save huge amounts of money."

A BBC report recently sparked a public debate about the rise of translation costs, currently estimated to be £ 100 Million each year.

Applied Language Solutions, a UK based translation agency, argue that the actual cost of more like £500 Million each year.

This is due to several factors, and could easily be reduced if only the government changed the way they handled and purchased translation and interpreting.

The main contributing factors are:

?   Translation is a hidden cost. It is put into marketing budgets, legal budgets and others as a project cost and not split out as translation. The cost is likely to be 5 times the BBC's estimate.

?   Costs could be reduced by up to 70% by pooling buying power and more importantly by using tools for translation memory. This technology remembers what has been translated so you don't pay full price each time you translate it, and of course much of what each authority get translated is the same.

?   Using print on demand could also make huge saving on printing material that never gets used.

Gavin Wheeldon, Managing Director of Applied Language said "Translation will not go away and will only grow due to the increasing immigration numbers and further expansion of the EU. We have been speaking to government, both nationally and locally, to begin a scheme to share a translation memory across all our public sector customers and are just trying to get authorities to agree to it to save huge amounts of money."

Source: Press release

Website:  www.appliedlanguage.com