When you think of translation services, Scotland isn’t exactly the first place to come to mind. And yes, we hear the jokes that some of those below the border could do with a Scottish-English translator more times than you would care to imagine.

For such a small country, there’s a surprisingly large export of goods from our chilly borders, which means there’s a necessity for translation services in Scotland.

But just what kind of languages do Scottish businesses translate into?

Well, the same as any other UK businesses, but there are a few things to take into account.

One of Scotland’s biggest exports is, unsurprisingly, Scotch whisky. This is an export market worth a whopping £3.45bn. And while the amber nectar goes down smoothly in USA and Europe, it’s increasingly more popular in such far-flung places as South Korea.

Here at Lingo we’ve seen a massive increase in the number of projects involving Asian-Pacific languages, with Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Russian being firm favourites.

And it’s not just exports. We see a great number of translation projects from Scottish businesses that involve documents intended for those living in Scotland. So why translate? Because their target market speak English only as a second language.

Targeting your multilingual domestic market is more important than ever, and it’s nice to see that Scottish businesses are recognising this fact. As a result, we translate all kinds of material that will stay in Scotland, from brochures to signs, into languages like Polish, Urdu and Chinese.

So while Scotland may be fairly ‘wee’ (that’s small to the non-Scots), it goes to show that there’s a huge demand for Scottish translation services. And we think that’s proper braw like*.

(*Very good indeed)

tags: Export, Translation, translation services in Scotland