China Translation Company Business Development Report, the first authoritative report about the translation industry since the founding of the PRC, was lately released by China Translation Companies Association. According to the Report, statistics as of the end of 2015 show that full-time employees in Chinese translation companies amounted to 1.19 million, including 53.8%Chinese translators, about 640,000.
According to the developing trend of Chinese translation industry and its external development opportunities in nearly a decade, it’s forecasted that the annual output value of Chinese translation companies will maintain an average annual growth rate of about 15% during the 12th Five-year Plan, and the annual output value of language service businesses in 2015 will outnumber 260 billion yuan, with the number of full-time employees to reach 2 million.
The Report also points out that Chinese translation companies are having problems like low requirements for market access, absence of relevant laws, too small scale as a whole, and low-level industrial concentration and int’l engagement, and offers ideas and suggestions as to rectification of these problems.
Overall competitive force to be enhanced
Chinese translation companies manage to acquire fast growth these years owing to the strong driving force of the external environment for the industry, but this emerging business is still immature in China and hardly exerts its development potential due to restrictions of many factors. In general, Chinese translations companies are mostly of small scales and have low-level industrial concentration and int’l engagement. The Report highlights that Chinese translation companies are basically serving individually, causing resources to be dispersed. Due to weak competitive force of the industry as a whole and it slow anti-risk capability, Chinese translation companies are usually in a disadvantaged position when facing competition from their int’l counterparts, so that there’re still very few Chinese businesses in the industry that can go global, set up branches overseas, take part in foreign trade organizations, and get authenticated as int’l translation companies.
Due to the small scale of Chinese translation companies, the absence of a capacity in innovating technologies and business models, and star khomogenization among them, competitions are especially fierce at low-end markets, leading to thin profits and dragged-down service quality. The Report believes that the overall competitive force of Chinese translation companies is not satisfactory because of limited investment and insufficient innovation capacity.
The talent is the foundation for business development; however, Chinese translation companies can hardly meet the market demand for the quantity, quality and training direction of such talents. The Report indicates that as of the end of 2010, nationwide professional translators in service were less than 30,000, and graduates from undergraduate and postgraduate programs of translation, which had only been launched years before, were estimated to be thousands of people, so that such a team of translators in a limited number can hardly adapt to the gradually expanding need of int’l communication. The lack of high-quality talents in translation companies has indeed become a key restraint on the industry’s development.
Featuring great development potential, Chinese translation companies still need to engage the efforts of trade associations, industry insiders and relevant organizations to fully exert the potential. The Report holds that by coordinating resources and strengths from all aspects possible, enhancing core competitive force and taking to standardized, large-scale and hi-tech-reliant growth, translation companies will achieve leaping development and brilliant economic and social benefits.
