Twitter announced last week that it would be making its site available in French, Italian, German, and Spanish (collectively known in the language services industry as “FIGS“). As countries in the northern hemisphere head into winter, is the blue bird migrating to other markets in search of a warm reception?
From a multilingual marketing perspective, Twitter currently pales in comparison to its social networking peers. Up until now, the Twitter utility has only been available to individuals who speak English and Japanese. In spite of its limited language appeal, Twitter managed to reach an impressive number of users throughout the world. In fact, as we reported before, many users took it upon themselves to translate their tweets into other languages, through Google’s machine translation, quick turn-around human translation, and other means.
Adding more languages is an obvious and important step for Twitter to increase its global reach. However, is Twitter doing the right thing by expanding its multilingual presence with these particular languages? Website globalization practitioners often ask us which countries and languages they should target to maximize return on their translation spend. We recently released updated figures for total available audience (TAA) and online gross domestic product (e-GDP) for 30 top countries online.
We also recently divulged the 30 most important languages on the web, as ranked by their share of what we call the “world online wallet,” or WOW factor. According to our ranking, Twitter has indeed chosen the best languages to maximize its return on investment (ROI) for translation efforts. After finishing with FIGS, Twitter will need to add Dutch, Simplified Chinese, Portuguese, and Korean into the mix to complete the Top 10 languages that will give them the most bang for their buck.
Like many social networking sites before it, Twitter has decided to go down the path of crowdsourced/collaborative/community translation (collectively known as “CT3“) in order to get its site up and running in other languages as quickly as possible, in spite of the fact that it employs its own (albeit small) in-house translation team. However, in an interesting move, Twitter did not send out a broadcast message to try and get all of its users to participate in its translation effort. Instead, volunteer translators must first send a message to express their interest in participating.
By opting for the “you’ll call us, we won’t call you” route, Twitter accomplishes two things. First, it retains greater control over the translators involved in this CT3 initiative. Second, it minimizes potential backlash from the freelance translator community, which voiced a visible protest against LinkedIn earlier this year when the company sent out a message to try and determine how much interest users would have in a potential CT3 effort. We predicted in our December 2007 report, “Collaborative Translation,” that companies should anticipate this type of push-back, and it looks like Twitter’s actions will be helpful on this front.
What’s next for social networking and CT3? We have both our binoculars and our microscopes focused on this trend. Throughout 2007 and 2008, we held multiple colloquia on this topic. We also documented the best practices for CT3 used by companies like Facebook, Microsoft, Plaxo, and Sun in our December 2008 report, “Translation of, for, and by the People.” Since that time, we’ve observed several companies standing on the shoulders of these giants. We’ve also watched other businesses make unfortunate mistakes. In which camp will Twitter ultimately fall? It remains to be seen, but if its recent language choices and initial outreach strategies are any indication, we believe that the announcement about its planned migration into new languages and markets ultimately bodes well for the survival of this particular species.
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
The Market for Medical Interpreter Certification
In recent months, the U.S. interpreting community has been flooded with information about the importance of certification for those interpreters working in health care settings. Confusion reigns as multiple groups now exist for advancing the agenda of medical interpreting certification. The sheer popularity of this cause begs the question, “Is there a market for that?”
The simple answer to our question is yes. There is definitely a market demand for medical interpreter certification in the United States. To come up with some estimates for exactly how much demand, we revisited the data we collected for our 2008 interpretation market sizing exercise (”TI Supply-Side Outlook” and “Top 15 Telephone Interpretation Suppliers“), along with the information we gathered regarding hospital spending on interpreting services (”The Language Access Ratio“). We also took a look at some data from external sources in order to see if our estimates passed the smell test.
Based on our aggregate analysis, Common Sense Advisory estimates that there are between 15,000 and 17,000 people currently performing medical interpreting work in the United States. This number includes both individuals who provide medical interpreting services as their primary profession – such as full-time staff interpreters, agency employee interpreters, and contract interpreters – and those who provide interpreting services as volunteers or bilingual staff. This number also includes interpreters that may perform work remotely in other locations (for example, telephone interpreters in call centers in other countries), but who provide services for patients and providers in the United States. However, this is a conservative estimate and includes spoken language interpreting services only. Data from sign language interpreting in medical settings was not included as part of our analysis.
Why is this number so large? An enormous percentage of the interpreting that takes place in U.S. health care settings is performed not by full-time medical interpreters, but by those who “occasionally” or “sometimes” interpret, such as bilingual health care workers and volunteers, and these individuals are included in our estimates. Unfortunately, a great deal of medical interpreting is carried out informally by well-meaning family members and friends of patients — not included in our estimates — who often make mistakes that lead to medical errors, misdiagnoses, and complications, resulting in increased costs and inefficiencies for the health care system, but sometimes in the loss of human life. This is one reason why language services play a starring role in the proposed legislation for health care reform.
And, the need for qualified medical interpreters is not unique to the United States. As we stated in our keynote presentation at this weekend’s IMIA conference, globalization is changing the shape of things to come for language access in health care. In fact, the need for more information on language access in health care has prompted us to launch our own research program for health care organizations. However, in spite of the size of this market (both domestic and global), the certification of language professionals is not a very lucrative endeavor. Not only are development costs high, but administration tends to be human-intensive, and human-delivered services cost plenty of money. In fact, some organizations that certify language professionals actually take a loss each time they deliver a test, recovering expenses through other means, such as fund-raising and events.
Over the past couple of years, we’ve received a stream of inquiries about medical interpreting certification regarding Language Line’s prominent role in pushing the certification agenda forward. As we stated before, it is in Language Line’s business interests to make medical certification a reality as quickly as possible — not because it stands to make any significant money from actually selling its own test — but in order to prevent further price compression in its core telephone interpreting market. As our recent research on telephone interpretation pricing reveals, health care buyers pay higher average and median prices per minute than their peers in other sectors. These buyers also place a premium on interpreter qualifications.
Now, two major initiatives are competing for interpreter certification “market share,” and perhaps more importantly, for mind share and interdisciplinary support:
The National Board of Certification for Medical Interpreters (NBCMI). The NBCMI was jointly founded by the International Medical Interpreters Association (IMIA) and Language Line Services (LLS). NBCMI has been holding annual meetings on the topic of medical interpreter certification, with the next event scheduled for May 1st, 2010 in Washington, DC. It is unclear how many organizations support the NBCMI effort aside from IMIA and LLS, but the website states that a list of its board members will be published soon. The NBCMI’s latest press release states that certification was officially launched this past weekend at the IMIA conference, and that Spanish will be the first language available, with other languages offered by 2010. The NBCMI website states that the effort will eventually be a 501(c)(3) non-profit.
The Certification Commission for Healthcare Interpreters (CCHI). Incorporated in July 2009 as a 501(c)(6), CCHI supporters consist of a virtual who’s who in health care, with 28 name-recognizable sponsors, including the American Medical Association, the American Hospitals Association, the American Translators Association, and many others. Also worth noting is the fact that CCHI’s advisory panel includes an expert from the National Organization for Competency Assurance (NOCA), and that some of Language Line’s major telephone interpreting competitors — such as CyraCom and LLE– are sponsoring the CCHI effort.
A third effort, the National Coalition on Health Care Interpreter Certification (NCC), consists of many — but not all — of the organizations that now make up both NBCMI and CCHI. Compared to the other two efforts, this group has not had any recent activity or updates, so it is unclear whether it will continue to exist or fade away in light of the other two initiatives.
This isn’t the first time we’ve witnessed a multiplicity of certification programs for interpreters in the U.S. — diverse programs exist for court interpreters and sign language interpreters — and now, it looks like medical interpreting will follow a similar multi-pronged path. In the short term, we believe that both major initiatives will continue to push forward with their stated objectives, regardless of who launches their test to the market more quickly. In the long term, any certification effort needs backing and support — including legislation, contractual language, and other requirements — in order to be broadly recognized and widely adopted. What really matters in the end is that the majority of those estimated 15,000-17,000 individuals have access to a valid and reliable process for assessing their interpreting skills. Millions of limited English proficient patients are counting on it
The simple answer to our question is yes. There is definitely a market demand for medical interpreter certification in the United States. To come up with some estimates for exactly how much demand, we revisited the data we collected for our 2008 interpretation market sizing exercise (”TI Supply-Side Outlook” and “Top 15 Telephone Interpretation Suppliers“), along with the information we gathered regarding hospital spending on interpreting services (”The Language Access Ratio“). We also took a look at some data from external sources in order to see if our estimates passed the smell test.
Based on our aggregate analysis, Common Sense Advisory estimates that there are between 15,000 and 17,000 people currently performing medical interpreting work in the United States. This number includes both individuals who provide medical interpreting services as their primary profession – such as full-time staff interpreters, agency employee interpreters, and contract interpreters – and those who provide interpreting services as volunteers or bilingual staff. This number also includes interpreters that may perform work remotely in other locations (for example, telephone interpreters in call centers in other countries), but who provide services for patients and providers in the United States. However, this is a conservative estimate and includes spoken language interpreting services only. Data from sign language interpreting in medical settings was not included as part of our analysis.
Why is this number so large? An enormous percentage of the interpreting that takes place in U.S. health care settings is performed not by full-time medical interpreters, but by those who “occasionally” or “sometimes” interpret, such as bilingual health care workers and volunteers, and these individuals are included in our estimates. Unfortunately, a great deal of medical interpreting is carried out informally by well-meaning family members and friends of patients — not included in our estimates — who often make mistakes that lead to medical errors, misdiagnoses, and complications, resulting in increased costs and inefficiencies for the health care system, but sometimes in the loss of human life. This is one reason why language services play a starring role in the proposed legislation for health care reform.
And, the need for qualified medical interpreters is not unique to the United States. As we stated in our keynote presentation at this weekend’s IMIA conference, globalization is changing the shape of things to come for language access in health care. In fact, the need for more information on language access in health care has prompted us to launch our own research program for health care organizations. However, in spite of the size of this market (both domestic and global), the certification of language professionals is not a very lucrative endeavor. Not only are development costs high, but administration tends to be human-intensive, and human-delivered services cost plenty of money. In fact, some organizations that certify language professionals actually take a loss each time they deliver a test, recovering expenses through other means, such as fund-raising and events.
Over the past couple of years, we’ve received a stream of inquiries about medical interpreting certification regarding Language Line’s prominent role in pushing the certification agenda forward. As we stated before, it is in Language Line’s business interests to make medical certification a reality as quickly as possible — not because it stands to make any significant money from actually selling its own test — but in order to prevent further price compression in its core telephone interpreting market. As our recent research on telephone interpretation pricing reveals, health care buyers pay higher average and median prices per minute than their peers in other sectors. These buyers also place a premium on interpreter qualifications.
Now, two major initiatives are competing for interpreter certification “market share,” and perhaps more importantly, for mind share and interdisciplinary support:
The National Board of Certification for Medical Interpreters (NBCMI). The NBCMI was jointly founded by the International Medical Interpreters Association (IMIA) and Language Line Services (LLS). NBCMI has been holding annual meetings on the topic of medical interpreter certification, with the next event scheduled for May 1st, 2010 in Washington, DC. It is unclear how many organizations support the NBCMI effort aside from IMIA and LLS, but the website states that a list of its board members will be published soon. The NBCMI’s latest press release states that certification was officially launched this past weekend at the IMIA conference, and that Spanish will be the first language available, with other languages offered by 2010. The NBCMI website states that the effort will eventually be a 501(c)(3) non-profit.
The Certification Commission for Healthcare Interpreters (CCHI). Incorporated in July 2009 as a 501(c)(6), CCHI supporters consist of a virtual who’s who in health care, with 28 name-recognizable sponsors, including the American Medical Association, the American Hospitals Association, the American Translators Association, and many others. Also worth noting is the fact that CCHI’s advisory panel includes an expert from the National Organization for Competency Assurance (NOCA), and that some of Language Line’s major telephone interpreting competitors — such as CyraCom and LLE– are sponsoring the CCHI effort.
A third effort, the National Coalition on Health Care Interpreter Certification (NCC), consists of many — but not all — of the organizations that now make up both NBCMI and CCHI. Compared to the other two efforts, this group has not had any recent activity or updates, so it is unclear whether it will continue to exist or fade away in light of the other two initiatives.
This isn’t the first time we’ve witnessed a multiplicity of certification programs for interpreters in the U.S. — diverse programs exist for court interpreters and sign language interpreters — and now, it looks like medical interpreting will follow a similar multi-pronged path. In the short term, we believe that both major initiatives will continue to push forward with their stated objectives, regardless of who launches their test to the market more quickly. In the long term, any certification effort needs backing and support — including legislation, contractual language, and other requirements — in order to be broadly recognized and widely adopted. What really matters in the end is that the majority of those estimated 15,000-17,000 individuals have access to a valid and reliable process for assessing their interpreting skills. Millions of limited English proficient patients are counting on it
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