Although the amount that Local Government spends on translations is never very far away from the headlines, it seems that the true cost of the provision of language services may be much higher than first thought…it is estimated to total some £500 million annually, in fact.

One company seems to be doing particularly well from this large volume of linguistic provision…M4 Translations. M4 was actually set up by Manchester Council in 1992 as an independent corporate entity, but wholly owned by the Council and given preferred supplier status.

The cost of maintaining M4 is around £280,000 per annum, and it recoups its costs by the twofold method of charging a nominal amount for the in house provision for the council’s 10 most frequently demanded languages and contracting out any other provision and profiting on arbitrage thereby.

The provision of translated material is proving increasingly controversial though; as one Chief Executive has stated “English is the worlds most used language, but we would never go abroad to any other country and expect signs and literature to be written in English”.

Thoughts anyone?