Translation Nation

The biggest player in translation services last year was publicly held Lionbridge, employing 4,000 full-time staff members and 10,000 freelancers in 25 countries, with a current market cap of $350 million. Lionbridge, based in Massachusetts, translates technology for mobile-phone companies and clients such as McDonald's, Google and Yahoo!. "Computer code is code," says Lionbridge chief marketing officer Kevin Bolen. "But certain things such as metrics, time stamps and characters have to be re-engineered and hard-encoded into the software to display Japanese kanji, for instance."

Lionbridge and its competitors recruit at universities and industry websites such as linguistlist.org with specialists of all stripes in demand, from automotive experts to those with a knack for medical jargon. "India has about a dozen dialects needed to capture a substantial customer base, says Bolen, "so for Nokia we're translating applications and phones and instructions in nine different ways."

Thanks to the Web, new companies become global from the get-go rather than at a later phase, Bolen explains. And localization companies don't just deal in words but also the look, feel and design of text images. "We ask if buttons and keys scale to match the size of the text," he says, noting German characters are 30% longer than those in English, while those in Japanese are 30% shorter.

Although English is the language of business, there is essential need for translators who understand Farsi, Urdu, Bahasa Indonesian, Tamil and Arabic. It goes back to what Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote: "There are no facts, only interpretations."