What are Language Services?
Language is the gate to the community of its speakers. If a product is not described in a language that its target market segment doesn’t understand, it never appeals to that target community and the business never succeeds.
Language is a means for selling a product; sharing an idea; establishing relationships; and generally for communicating whatever idea or information. Nowadays, the world has become a small village, one, because of the internet, and, two, because of the availability of translation services.
Translation, thus, is one of the language services. Interpreting (oral translation) is another. Editing or proofreading (checking the accuracy of text) is also another. Typesetting, formatting, desktop publishing, typing, recording, transcribing (converting audio into text), narrating (converting text into audio), etc. could be considered as the parts of language services.
Who provides the language services?
In this current age of information technology, you may be able to find machine translation services, such as Google Translate, for certain high tech languages (English, French, Spanish, Russian, German, etc.). Yet, human translation – the cultural accuracy can never be replaced by a machine translation. Besides, rare or less tech savvy languages, such Amharic or Dinka, are way behind from being sensible on Google Translate.
Therefore, the language services are provided by professional linguists who are highly educated and fluent in the foreign language (in this case English). The often work from English into their native language.
