Abstract：This paper makes a brief introduction of the translation business in China from several perspectives: its potential market and problems.
Rapid development of globalization in the last half of the twentieth century has greatly influenced numerous professions, among the rest, translation. As the world is increasingly like a global village, the need for communication between nations is now spurring a speedy growth in a new industry—translation industry, as demonstrated by the following figures:
According to an EU report, the translation services market is valued at over US$30 billion annually, which is growing at 15-18 percent per year.
According to the statistics issued by Allied Business Intelligence Inc., the output value of the global translation industry in the year of 2003 would surpass 13 billion U.S. dollars and that in the Chinese mainland would amount to about RMB12.7 billion Yuan; by 2005, the mainland would witness great potentials in this industry, with its sales possibly up to RMB20 billion Yuan.
Huge as the market is, translation firms mushroomed at the turn of the 21st century. Like other countries, China also witnesses a booming translation service market. Translation is deemed as a promising and profitable business since a far less investment is needed at the initial stage. With an input of only approximately ten thousand Yuan, one can easily start such a business and may achieve a net profit margin of 30-35%. With such profit potential, it is highly recommended in magazines, newspapers, and even on Internet to set up a translation firm. The rapid development of the market has sparked professionalization and commercialization of translation. These features highly differentiate current translators from their traditional role. In the past, translators were often driven by personal interests of missions. For literary translators especially, translation was, in most cases, a part-time recreation. As translation was notoriously poorly paid, few translators took this career merely out of monetary purposes (Nida). However, the major trend of current translation activities is changing. Many people undertake translation tasks to make a living. This triggered great changes in the nature and motivation of current translation activities. A professor in Qinghua University once pointed out that translation has become a profession since the latter half of the twentieth century and been recognized around the world since the 1970s. Translators or interpreters will be like lawyer, doctors and accountants who provided services in return for remunerations, and required to obtain necessary qualifications and regarded as professionals in their fields.
Prosperous as the translation sector seems, it also faces many problems, such as inadequate regulation, unfair competition, irrational customer environment, poor translation quality, insufficient talents, etc., and there is no administration dedicated to the supervision of it. Therefore, it has long been lack of sufficient regulation. Any individual or person can easily get access to the sector. Responsible translation firms search for other means for identity and recognition, such as ISO9001:2000, membership of the national translator associations or foreign translator associations. On the other hand, since most customers who need translation services, have little knowledge of the foreign language concerned, it is beyond their power to judge the accuracy of the translation. It is commonly believed that anyone with bilingual competence can easily finish a translation task within a very limited time. Moreover, there are also enterprises that fail to notice the importance of translation and deem that as long as there are foreign language words on the packages of their products or websites, they and their companies are going globally. In this case, translation fee rate becomes the major concern. All these factors give rise to unfair competition and poor translation quality, and it is quite probable that not only the customers but also some goodwill companies are the ones who suffer from this disorder. Fortunately, for the benefit of the sector, GB/T-19363.1-2003 (Specification for Translation Service) was promulgated in 2003 and began to be executed in 2004 and other national standards concerning this sector are in the process of investigation and argumentation, which will soon be open to the public; qualification tests were brought into operation. These actions are to the interests of both the receiver and provider of translation service. But more efforts are needed.
