Translation services can be a very lucrative business!
We all know that there is a lot of money in the translation services industry; one only has to look around at some very high profile examples to see that.
No one can be unaware of the huge amount expended on translation and interpretation services by the UN…in every full Council meeting a minimum of 60 (and growing) interpreters must be present just for the Council to be able to function; further, there is a permanent staff of some 2,500 linguists of all kinds and regular ad hoc employment of agency translators in order to fill in any shortfall. Another closer to home example is that of the burgeoning cost of providing translation services to the growing number of new arrivals within the country; all Government and Local Authority sectors are affected by this and the expenditure only looks set to increase substantially.
All of this seems dwarfed though by one US Company, Global Linguist Solutions (GLS), who seems to have hit the proverbial jackpot with regard to translation services contracts. The Company has just been awarded a US Government contract worth up to $4.6 Billion over the next 5 years. The contract is to provide up to 7,000 translators for use within the Iraqi theatre of operations.
Under the contract, GLS would hire around 6,000 local Iraqi translators and about 1,00 US Citizens; personnel from both groups would be gradually ‘embedded’ within all strata of the US ground presence so that eventually there would not be a single operational unit that would not have immediate access to translation services.
Lest one think that a single contract like this would be like manna from heaven to any translation company, this contract is actually the third such contract that the company has been awarded in recent years!