Crisis and Translation Service Market in Ukraine

/How does the crisis affect the translation service market (general considerations, no figures)/

Translation agencies are participants of the market, so it is naturally that the national economic crisis, which is a part of world financial crisis, has affected them to a full extent.

The economic crisis is gaining momentum, spreading to new and new industrial and economic sectors, banking activity and service. At present, we see a globalization of crisis processes: they are becoming more visible for all, having impact on revenues, well-being and confidence in the future and, of course, attitudes of the overwhelming majority of people.

It is clear that the crisis has not passed by the translation service market as well. The decrease in import, freezing and reduction of international economic and production relations and contracts, introduction of restrictions on foreign travels of officials and delegations, as well as the decline in international tourism, have already influenced on a number of orders received by translation providers. And as the crisis is exacerbating, those processes will be more persistent thereby raising the competition among translation agencies and individual translators.

But will that cause a significant decrease in prices for translation services? One may say surely that the prices will not go down. Neither translation agencies nor working professional translators will not afford to speculate for a fall of prices. The reason for that is quite simple: in the great majority of cases, that job is the basic source of income. And despite a number of orders is lower, you cannot expect for cheap services to come.

However, along with that, you may anticipate a significant growth of offers from translators with unprecedentedly low prices in Internet and free advertisement newspapers. These prices may vary from 3 to 7 hryvnia per one standard page. Why are they so fantastically generous? And who are those translators acting as good Samaritans?

Speaking frankly, those 'cheap' translation offers always exist, but their writers are not professional translators at all. The most frequently such offers are provided by retirees, pupils and student who know a foreign language to the extent of 'translation with dictionary', as we called that earlier. Namely, their skills are within school or university syllabus.

And those skills are explicitly insufficient for translation of any text. Now, given the crisis, a number of those who want to have a side translation job will be permanently growing. In addition, those 'progressive translators' use electronic translation programs which, at best, may provide only an approximate picture of general content of the text or, which is also quite often, may distort an essence of the text making it quite the opposite.

However, for those providers it is not important whether a content of translation is in conformity with an original document or not. More to the point here is to do some editing to make the text more or less readable, and a customer is left to clear up the other mess.

To avoid from being a victim of such 'pseudo-specialists', we may only advise you not to seek for cheap services. Refer to translation agencies or trusted translators.

When saving your money on translations, you can lose much more. Even if you are searching for a translator via Internet or in newspaper advertisements, you have to ask what is his/her experience and whether he/she is working with at least one translation agency.