Language services industry

The Paris Peace Conference in 1919 was a historic moment in many ways. The Treaty of Versailles marked the official end of World War I and if that wasn’t enough, it also established the League of Nations (later the United Nations) and the International Labour Office (ILO).

In this episode of Globally Speaking, we chat with Mohamed Abo El Fotouh, Digital and Media Lead for the Middle East and Asia Pacific Region for PepsiCo, about marketing tactics in the MENA region—Middle East and North Africa. We discuss how MENA is different from other regions, its market sub-clusters, why regional marketing campaigns work well and the biggest mistake foreign companies make. Plus, we get some new music recommendations!

Localization, by its very nature, is a global business. The globalized language service company offers several distinct advantages outside of production efficiency. The globalized language service company also has the opportunity to offset domestic revenues with foreign revenues helping to diversify portfolios and create stability regardless of market fluctuations.

A couple of weeks ago, we discussed the difference between audiovisual translation and media localization. In this Nimdzi Finger Food, we will review the different terms used to describe media localization modes related to audio recording.

The UK market is the second largest localization and interpreting market in the world. It is defined by several large language service companies, a handful of mid-sized players and over a thousand smaller or specialist companies competing to meet client needs. Nimdzi and the Association of Translation Companies (ATC) have combined their efforts to provide a comprehensive overview of the language industry in the United Kingdom. 

The Northwest Translators and Interpreters Society (NOTIS) Annual Conference brings translators, interpreters, and language professionals under one roof to discuss the topics, trends, and challenges of working in the T&I industry. The thirty-year-old association attracted a motivated crowd to Washington’s Museum of Flight in Seattle for the two-day conference.

To wrap up our series on transcription, we invited Sam Liang, Founder and CEO of Otter.ai, to talk about his company’s innovative transcription technology. He discusses the wide variety of use cases for his service, how he’s combined speech-to-text and neural language processing and how he sees transcription technology evolving in the future. Podcast: Talking […]

The language services industry is all about providing, well, language services. Services, as a rule, are something that are incredibly hard to patent or trademark. You cannot patent the act of translating any more than you could copyright a verb. This doesn’t mean that translation companies haven’t tried to get a competitive advantage by building and protecting their own intellectual property (IP). Usually this comes in the form of either patenting a technology or a certain workflow process. Most of the time, though, the technologies and the workflow processes are so interconnected that it is difficult to distinguish one from the other.

Nimdzi has gathered responses from over 100 localization decision-makers to understand what are the deciding factors when selecting which language services provider (LSP) to partner with, both on an individual level, as well as what their companies are looking for.

It’s time to clarify something: Language service providers (LSPs) do not provide translation. They provide vendor management, project management, and sales. This may come as a shock to you. You may then ask why one would hire a language services company to provide translations if that is not even their core competency?