APPENDIX B - Why There Are About 333,000 Professional Translators and Interpreters in the World

Summary

Some of the data collected in the course of this research indicate the need for a reality principle with respect to the rough numbers of professional translators and interpreters that could be working within a given national or regional industry. For example, when the Romanian Ministry of Justice lists 32,856 “certified translators and interpreters”, it is difficult to see how so many people could be translating in an economy of that size. Similarly, the 2008—10 statistics for Australia show NAATI certifying 1,856 people a year as translators and interpreters, in a country where the main translator association has only about 500 members. Some kind of measuring stick is needed to tell us when such figures seem incorrect or should be attributed to special factors.

One available instrument is particularly blunt but potentially useful. Parker (2008) estimates the “latent demand” for translation and interpreting services in all the countries (and for 2000 cities!) in the world. This basically means estimating the size of the translation and interpreting industry in “efficient” high-income countries for which data are available, then relating the size of the industry to national income, and finally applying that formula across the globe, as if language services were a function of no more than macroeconomic indicators. Despite those very naive assumptions, the numbers may act as a garde-fou for other cross-country comparisons.