Before the COVID19 pandemic, business process outsourcing reached 92.5 billion dollars globally. The new realities brought about by this pandemic have led most companies in the world to consider adopting automation and cloud computing solutions to streamline their business processes and ensure the health and well-being of their employees and associates.
Language Services Outsourcing
For global IT companies, it is the go-to model to solve their communication needs.
Software development outsourcing is a solution for most of today's companies that want to cut costs and focus on their core business. IT service outsourcing is a financially and operationally viable solution that helps to stay ahead in the digital age. However, doing it locally can be expensive. Offshore / nearshore software development models are currently, and for a few years now have been, the best option.
Offshore and nearshore IT development
Software development outsourcing is currently experiencing a boom like never before. This industry has put a number of countries back on the global business map. The countries with the largest number of offshore/nearshore IT development centers are located in Asia (China, India, Philippines and Vietnam), Europe (Hungary, Poland, Romania, Ukraine and Bulgaria), and LATAM (Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Mexico).
Language: the last hurdle in the IT offshore / nearshore model
English is the lingua franca of the global IT services industry. The largest software firms in the world have their headquarters and/or their development centers mainly in English-speaking countries such as India and the US. However, the clients of IT firms are global organizations: financial institutions in Russia, oil companies in Italy, airlines in Chile, government agencies in Brazil, telecommunications providers in Mexico, among many other examples. Although the IT staff of these companies are ideally English-speaking, the end users of the implemented technologies are often not, and therefore require documentation, information and applications in their own language.
Translation services in the IT development industry
For global IT companies, the trend points to the outsourcing of language services as the most appropriate model to solve their communication needs with clients and users in various geographies.
In 2020, the global market for language services (including translation, interpretation, localization, and transcreation) reached $57.8 billion, and is expected to grow 7.5% annually between 2021 and 2026.
According to a GlobeNewsWire report, at a global level, the information technology industry occupies a preponderant place in the segmentation of the language services market, only behind the health services industry.
This tells us about the importance of translation, transcreation, and other linguistic services for what is currently the largest industry in the world.
In a later issue, we will expand on the different work models that are the best fit for IT companies to translate and globalize their content.