Translation & Interpreting Departments in private companies Thread poster: Anna Lanave
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Anna Lanave 
Italy
Local time: 15:00
French to Italian
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Hi all!
I need some information, I hope you can help.
I wish to know if there are private companies having an internal translation and interpreting department.
Do you know any?
Thank you.
Anna
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Grigori Gazarian
Mexico
Local time: 07:00
Member (2021)
Spanish to Russian
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| Samsung Ingeniería (Mexico) | Feb 12, 2013 |
...has a small (3 translators) translation department.
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| Increasingly rare | Feb 12, 2013 |
As far as I am aware, only really big corporations still have such departments. In all my years in business, I have only known of one of them, and it was for a huge German chemical group. This kind of facility has been widely dismantled in favour of translation agencies.
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I can only confirm what Tomás says. I worked as in-house translator in two big IT corporations that used to have internal teams of translators but over the years I saw them and similar others outsource their internal linguistic services more and more. They keep only PMs internally, usually for dealing with their vendors. And their vendors are none else than well-known LSPs, who use freelance translators and compete against each other on a price basis.
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Paul Lambert
United States
Local time: 06:00
French to English
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Hi Anna,
I know that a some of the Big 4 auditors have internal translation departments; I worked for one in Madrid, Spain, for 5 years (up until mid-2012). That said, the trend seems to be leaning towards downsizing these departments, and in other audit firms (not the one where I worked), a large share of the work was already being outsourced to agencies or specialised freelance translators.
Paul
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Paul Lambert
United States
Local time: 06:00
French to English
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P.S. In case it's of interest, I know my Italian counterparts working for the audit firm I worked for did work in an in-house translation department, although as far as I can remember there were just two of them there so I guess a huge amount of work was outsourced.
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| Confirming what the above posters said | Feb 12, 2013 |
In Germany, it is my impression that most companies that used to have in-house staff now have 1-2 in-house PMs and have outsourced their translation services to agencies. That's not all bad if it's a boutique-type agency that specializes in corporate communications, does excellent terminology management work, has people who can take on copywriting, but often that's not the situation.
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nrichy (X)
France
Local time: 15:00
French to Dutch
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| Confirming too | Feb 13, 2013 |
but this is not new.
As far as I can see there are three trends, sometimes mixed up:
- have the stuff translated by the employees (engineers, salesmen),
- internships (typically "projects" such as translation of websites, to be done in 1-3 months),
- outsourcing. In this case, the purchasing dept. acts as a PM and selects severely (size of the agency, cashflow, price, etc.).
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Steve Derry
Spain
Local time: 15:00
German to English
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Not sure if you'd describe it as a private company, but they have one, or certainly did a year ago.
Regards
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Anna Lanave
Italy
Local time: 15:00
French to Italian
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TOPIC STARTER | Company names | Feb 13, 2013 |
Hi guys and thank you for your posts.
I am sure there is quite a number of companies having an internal translation department.
In Switzerland there is SwissPost, in Germany I heard of Audi and Mercedes. Grigori says that in Mexico Samsung has an Internal dept too. Maybe Samsung in Korea has its own.
I need to contact them for a study, so you can write me a private message if you want.
Anna
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avsie (X)
Local time: 15:00
English to French
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| I work for one | Feb 13, 2013 |
I work as Localization Engineer/Project Manager/Translator in an in-house department. You can contact me privately via my profile.
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| Finance industry - US | Feb 13, 2013 |
I worked in house for a couple of large financial companies as an interpreter and translator. The second company laid us all off in Sept of 2011, which is why I am a freelancer now.
None of the other companies that I interacted with had any bilingual employees.
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