The Russian translation market: Nowitex Translation's view and opinion

On today’s market status and characterization 

Just like any other market, today’s market of professional translation services is characterized by chaotic movements of translation companies and agencies, freelance interpreters, amateurs fond of foreign languages with good writing skills, technical translation departments in large-scale companies and research institutions. There are no key players, monopolists or outsiders on this market. Translation services are a product requiring an individual approach, high quality, diligence on the verge of self-sacrifice and style. If you want this and have enough time, you can improve on these skills and make them work for your company. Successful development on the translation market depends in many aspects on human factor.

On major post-crisis market trends

The following basic trend has recently been observed on the translation market after the crisis: freelancer personalization. While freelance translators in the past only used to cooperate with translation agencies, the situation today is totally different as freelancers have become independent players on this market. They become self-employed entrepreneurs and advertise their services on different translation websites and translators forums. In addition to competition with one another, translation agencies today also compete with these freelancers as well. Such competition is not good for translation agencies because distribution of orders on this market makes all players equal.

On clients’ attitude to cost-quality ratio and price dumping  

It is true that most clients are primarily interested in translation prices. They are searching for companies that charge less, regardless of the efforts and labor involved. Price dumping is the key obstacle to development on this market. Low-price translations easily win customers’ hearts. However, such ‘cheapness’ is usually achieved at the expense of careful translations and diligent proofreading. As a result, such customer sets a new basic requirement on quality of translations. These two criteria — price and quality — have always been the key priorities for selecting any service and product, and will always remain so.

On market drivers and growth factors

It is relatively difficult to analyze the business growth rates in this sector because there are too many factors influencing such growth, from business strategies to ever-increasing taxes. Besides, one more outbreak of crisis can abruptly inhibit any growth trends. In this regard, our motto is as follows: “Do what you must do; do it to the best possible quality, and then let what ought to happen, happen, there is always a chance that things eventually will turn out successfully by luck.” Taking into consideration the reality of Russian businesses, this motto is applicable to all market sectors.

“The fundamental principles of our company are high quality, professionalism, efficiency, reliability and confidentiality.”

On market future and forecasts

Are there any forecasts for the future? Of course, I would like to see us moving towards a more civilized market, which means price unification and creation of a narrow specialized market sub-sectors (technical, medical, legal translations, etc.), translation and translator databases in the subsectors, and common space for glossary databases for the Translation Memory systems. We also need to join our efforts in all these spheres with the translation markets in other European countries. Indeed, such basic concept as ‘a standard translation page’ usually means different things in different countries.  For instance, while in Russia this means a page containing 1,800 characters including spaces, the same term, however, means 250 words in other European countries. Let alone criteria for quality of translations...

On company’s key features and competitive advantages

The fundamental principles of our company are high quality, professionalism, efficiency, reliability and confidentiality. Working in full compliance with these principles, we have succeeded in building long-term mutually beneficial partnerships with large-scale, efficient companies and attracting new major customers based on their recommendations.