Looking for the Next Dublin: Language Services on the Edge

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Global Watchtower

Common Sense Advisory Blogs

Posted by Renato S. Beninatto on May 31, 2006 in the following blogs: Translation and Localization, Web Globalization, Business Globalization, Technology, Interpreting, Market Data, Global Marketing, Best Practices, Supplier Business Issues
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Just when we were getting tired of the Elizabeth Arden circuit (Paris, London, New York, Tokyo), we have been invited to visit out-of-the-way locations such as Plovdiv (Bulgaria), Guatemala City, and Rosario (Argentina).

Instead of finding translation agencies fighting for the saturated markets of language translation services, we met entrepreneurs who have combined the offshoring appeal of cheap labor with the opportunity to provide non-traditional services to localization and translation buyers and to other providers.

Opticentre is located in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, at 8,000 years the oldest city in the world. Founded by an Irish entrepreneur, this language services startup has assembled a group of young and talented technologists to manage multilingual content-heavy implementations such as Autodesk's Idiom WorldServer effort. From deep in the Balkans, Opticentre performs non-linguistic administrative and workflow tasks They serve as middlemen between clients and LSPs performing the translation, facilitating the exchange of files and monitoring the workflow process.

Guatemala's Omni Technolgies has been localizing software for 12 years. It found its niche in offering project management and terminology management services for LSPs in the United States, thus avoiding concetrating on the overcrowded space for Spanish language services. Guatemala's central position (same time zone as Texas and Illinois) favors service to U.S. clients. Omni is part of the conglomerate that brought the internet to Central America, so it's well-wired to the global grid.

Rosario, upriver from Argentina's Big Apple (Buenos Aires), hosts a growing number of LSPs including Rosario, SpanSource, and Ushuaia. Each developed expertise in specialty niches to satisfy their Spanish translation clients around the world, including the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. These LSPs offer multilingual file preparation, application of translation memory, proposal preparation services, and backoffice and multilingual DTP operations. The city of Rosario recently attracted Moravia Worldwide to the shores of the Paran? River. Just as companies like Jonckers followed Moravia to Brno in the Czech Republic, Moravia chose to take advantage of the language awareness and training in Rosario, which boasts one of the best translation schools in the region. Argentina brings a few other business advantages to language buyers: 1) time zone proximity (it's never more 2 hours ahead of New York or 3 hours behind Europe); 2) largely European population, offering a high degree of cultural compatibility with clients in North American and Europe compared to the difficulties some companies have had with Eastern European, Indian, and Chinese suppliers; and 3) South America's wage structure. However, there's no direct flight to Rosario from Boston, London, or Frankfurt.

While some service providers wring their hands in anxiety about Lionbridge's Freeway (free, but proprietary) and SDL's dominance of the translation memory market (widespread, but expensive), others are setting up alternative models of production that attract the interest of both LSPs and end buyers.

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