Writing us out of the job??

I heard it somewhere just a few months ago: translation agencies, squeezed by a diminishing market in the recession, will opt into selling their clients technology instead of translators. And you thought that Machine Translation was bad? Think again, it saves us time. But we used to be able to make extra money editing, typesetting, DTPing.

"TransPerfect has provided translation services for various divisions of Arch Chemicals for over 4 years. Through the expanded relationship, Arch Chemicals will also implement TransPerfect's GlobalLink GMS technology platform which will automate many of the manual and labor-intensive tasks associated with procuring translation services. GlobalLink technology may be either installed or hosted; Arch will implement GlobalLink's hosted solution, which enables the company to benefit from drastically reduced project management time, more cost-savings from enhanced leveraging of previous translations, and faster time-to-market for translated content, all through a secure and intuitive web interface. "

This "leveraging of previous translations" simply means that they will be writing less in simpler English, unify the terminology, and produce information in a way that will not necessitate the presence of a human translator.

According to John Hott of Arch Chemicals' global Regulatory Affairs department, "Based on our longstanding relationship with TransPerfect, we knew they would provide our company with exceptional service and translation quality. By centralizing our translation projects with TransPerfect and implementing their GlobalLink technology, we will now also benefit from more consistent terminology and more efficient project management."

Oh yeah. Meanwhile, TP will try to offload the REAL translations, in hundreds of thousands of words, at some peanut rates and incredible deadlines. Simply because they think humans are part of the GlobalLink, too. Kegs. Bytes. Zeros and ones.