Tag Archives: moving upmarket in translation

     

Creative Destruction Engulfs the Translation Industry: Move Upmarket Now or Risk Becoming Obsolete

Published on April 29, 2017
    


Heartfelt, Urgent Advice for Colleagues Stuck in the Downward Pricing Vortex of the Bulk Market Imagine for a moment that you were in the business of manufacturing digital cameras. In fact, let’s take it a step further and say you invented digital photography. These cameras were a bit pricey at first, and the initial images were terrible, but their innovation was that they eliminated film and film processing; the pictures were immediately visible, could be stored, shared and posted almost anywhere, and the picture quality eventually became startlingly good. Then along came the smartphone. They were unusually expensive five years ago, but the white-hot smartphone market is synonymous with brutal competition between innovative companies like Apple and Samsung, and pricing, features, longevity and physical resiliency have grown dramatically. So today such innovation has resulted in a smartphone market where progress…



It Was the Best of Times, It Was the Worst of Times: How the Premium Market Offers Translators Prosperity in an Era of Collapsing Bulk-Market Rates

Published on September 2, 2014
    


The skill set required to succeed at professional translation is so demanding, extensive, persistent and endlessly expanding that “being bilingual” falls several light-years short of even qualifying for consideration. This holds true for successful translators working in every sector of the translation market. After all, translation is, among other things, the craft of leveraging every aspect of your life-long experience, training, subject-matter expertise, writing skills and cultural sense in a way that allows you to project all that collective and hard-earned knowledge onto the page in a compelling and authoritative narrative. So it makes sense that the more focused, targeted and specialized that expertise, the more specialized the market served. And this is where it gets complicated. It’s perhaps not surprising that since translation is the gateway through which all globalized commerce must pass, the translation market itself is very…


         
  
   
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