I am not sure exactly when, but sometime in the early 1980s one-hour photo stores became the norm. Instead of sending your film to a central lab for development and printing, stores started to print your photos on premises and deliver them in one hour or even less.
A similar kind of service is now being offered for translations. Instead of calling a translation agency for a quote, paying for the work and then waiting a few days for the translation, you can do it all online and get the translation within hours. Some of the companies that offer this service are Tolingo, Mygengo and OneHourTranslation. Babylon, the vendor of translation dictionaries has launched a similar service. And there are other companies as well. Some of these companies have received funding from VCs, resulting in valuable media coverage and advertisement.
So should the old-fashioned translation agencies be worried? Will the one-hour shops take over the industry? I myself don’t think so and I believe that these companies will have limited commercial success. And I can think of a few reasons.
Bigger companies have tried this in the 90’s with little or no success. Google launched a Translation Center in 2008, only to shelve it within hours of its launch (read about it here). Lionbridge launched a similar service a few years ago called Elcano; it is now available as a tool for existing Lionbridge customers and is not available to the general public. The other big players in the industry have not seen this as a sufficient opportunity and have not launched a similar service.
Corporate customers (the ones with large budgets) are unlikely to entrust their mission critical translation work to a machine which is nameless, faceless and has no phone number. A lot of the big money in the translation business is in software localization which is not a candidate for the one-hour shops. Corporate customers will opt for the old-fashioned companies with an account rep./project manager whom they know and trust.
The main candidates to use this service are the nickel-and-dime customers that have a letter, an email or an odd document to translate. How much money is there in this kind of work? And even here there are considerable hurdles to overcome. What about scanned documents? Or DTP files like InDesign and Framemaker? The one-hour shops only handle MS Office files and editable PDFs. Anyone who is in this business has learned that many projects involve other types of files. And what about projects that require highly specialized translators (like clinical trial documents or patents), the kind that don’t grow on trees and are hard to find?
But I could be wrong. Maybe the one-hour shops will do a great job and make a fortune. Do you have an opinion about it? Do you have any experiences with online translation shops that you would like to share? Your comments are welcome.
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