Putting this in the soap box to receive more serioues replies. This is something of a business industry inquiry to anyone reading.

I will just somewhat throw this out there. I am trying to gather an idea of what business industries would really benefit from a translating service. By translating service I mean a guaranteed accurate translation from any one language to another where no meaning is lost or changed in the process... not a babelfish ordeal.

Perhaps this is best explained via example. Legal offices working with legal documents in multiple languages would need guaranteed accurate translation from one language to another to support a case. So I would consider legal services as a business industry worthwhile to approach with such a concept. Governmental agencies, medical industries, and even website translations for companies breaching the global barrier come to mind.

So with that said... I am just looking to do a bit of informal research by asking others what they would consider a market worth approaching with such a service. If anyone has ideas or input... positive or negative I don't care... fire away... I'm all ears

8/15/2006 10:15:44 AM

to oversimplify, anything in "international business"

course more and more domestic businesses have a need for spanish nowadays

8/15/2006 10:19:54 AM

true - almost any company that has a worthwhile product... and has aspirations of growth... should be looking to expand internationally with the way globalization is taking over (but that is a totally different debate/topic)

Ultimately though... I am trying to identify market groups based on this concept. Trade companies, governmental agencies, medical industries, etc... these just seem to stand out as being very well tied into a need for translating services versus trying to wing it in-house.

I say this is informal research because my curiosity was spiked by a company I used to work for and how they suffered through a website translation process when attempting to handle it internally... and then I began wondering about what companies would have to deal with that type of translation on a daily/weekly/monthly basis as opposed to a one time ordeal. So of course I have to go dig up information about those markets, etc, etc

8/15/2006 10:32:51 AM

definitely finance, government, consulting

8/15/2006 10:53:01 AM

What you're talking about is localization (translation of text into many different languages). Perhaps more so than any other industry, IT requires support for multitudinous translations of complex information to many different languages.

Historically localization for IT has been done in Ireland, and it has become a major center of outsourced and offshored localization services.

This is a big topic, and it covers a lot more than just translating text. There are political concerns. For example, in Windows 95:

Quote :

"The Indian government threatened to ban all Microsoft software from the country because we assigned a disputed region to Pakistan in the time zone map. (Any map that depicts an unfavorable border must bear a government stamp warning the end-user that the borders are incorrect. You can't stamp software.) We had to make a special version of Windows 95 for them."

(http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2003/08/22/54679.aspx)

8/16/2006 2:11:48 AM

You know with my IT knowledge I should have put two and two together... I had not looked at this in that light before. Thanks for the input - I am going to do some digging/research today during lunch I think

8/16/2006 7:55:57 AM