Every time we listen to the news, we might be forgiven for concluding that in these recessionary times, every business is about to, or actually has hit the skids. But as the old saying goes; “It’s an ill wind…” and so it appears; for far from hitting a terminal decline, some businesses are doing quite well BECAUSE of the challenging economic climate.

The advent of the Internet has brought a wealth of opportunities since its rise to primacy as the world’s primary business and communications medium; indeed many translation services companies now rely on the internet as the basis of their business model. It is fascinating then, to see how a business opportunity has arisen for even amateur translators, from what originated as a free service provided by film fans.

Although the outlook on the domestic front of late has seemed bleak, with the threat of both Banking collapses and now the threat of recession; the term ‘worldwide recession’ often bandied about by all sections of the press, may actually be somewhat misleading.

The IMF (International Monetary Fund) has just published in its latest edition of the ‘World Economic Outlook’ which states that world growth is due to fall from 3.9% to a still creditable 3% and that the ‘Developing World’ would grow by 6% rising to perhaps 9% in China.

This month the Swedish Academy convened for its annual task of honouring the most outstanding individuals in their fields worldwide; but whilst the corpus of a candidate’s life work might be notable enough to come to the attention of the Swedish Academy, it seems that often a candidate’s efforts are mostly relatively unknown worldwide.

Now in many cases this is understandable, as work in Molecular Biology or Particle Physics would not generally be known or even understood outside elite circles of academics, however, when applied to literature, the opposite ought to be expected to apply.

The chronic shortage of battlefield interpreters and translators in the US Armed Forces has been an ongoing and hard to solve problem for some time, with languages such as Arabic, Pashto, Dari, Persian, Farsi, Hindi…and surprisingly Indonesian and Tagalog being particularly sought after.

Although efforts have been made to encourage capable soldiers to take up the study of these languages by enrolling in specialist courses, progress has been slow as it naturally takes some while to become proficient in these languages.