In our ranking of the top 20 translation companies, there were some large agencies that didn’t make the cut although they qualified on a revenue basis. One of these was the Canadian Translation Bureau (CTB), a government-owned agency that booked CA$199 million in language revenue last year. Why didn’t we include the CTB in the top 5 of our rankings?

It’s all about who the customer is. Here, the customer is almost exclusively the government and the vendor is owned by the government. We spoke with the CTB’s managing director, Donald Barabé, who told us that his agency booked less than 2% of its revenue from commercial clients. That 2% got us wondering – - what private company in its right mind would outsource anything to the government? But that may be an ethnocentric bias due to our own experiences in the U.S., Brazil, and various countries with socialist governments.

The CTB has 60 offices spread across the Dominion, employing 1,708 staff. As a government agency, it doesn’t qualify as a for-profit corporation. However, unlike government agencies south of the Canadian border, the Bureau has to recover its full costs from fellow Canadian Government Departments and Agencies using its services. Accountability and strict cost accounting – - that’s a refreshing characteristic in a government agency.

Barabé’s Bureau doesn’t have a lock on government business, though. The CTB must be competitive, lest other government agencies choose to buy translation services from a more efficient private supplier that charges less or that can deliver the goods more expeditiously.

One last point — but it’s one we hear all the time about government employees in just about every country we have visited. Canadian LSPs have told us that they think the CTB’s translators are spoiled and make too much money. If employees of the Canadian Translation Bureau agree, we think that’s another welcome change from the usual stories told by translators.