Arabic Translations, Thriving In Hard Times — Arabic Translations

As the world seems to fall apart around us, essential businesses with the capacity to work remotely are thriving. Services that can be rendered without in-person interaction continue to be sought after and provided by remote professionals across the board. Consequently, the demand for language services, including Arabic translations continues.

This isn’t something to brag about but it is something to be thankful for, and we are taking this time to connect with the people in our industry more than ever. It’s always said, “Your network is equal to your net worth”. As we enter into very uncertain times we are encouraging everyone in our network, new colleagues and old, to stay connected with one another and with us to promote and remain in tune with revenue-generating opportunities as we serve those who need translation work done for them.

Increasing Business for Remote Language Service Providers

Various businesses are seeing an increased demand for translation services and remote interpreting, especially in the healthcare industries.

Medical businesses are implementing policy changes due to the coronavirus and this information needs to be translated and distributed in all major languages to help educate the population and avoid the unnecessary spread of the disease. Healthcare announcements, symptom charts, and other instructions are also needing to be urgently translated so that information can be received across large populations of citizen speaking languages such as Spanish, Creole, French, Tagalog, and of course Arabic.

Remote interpretation technology is also being sought after more. However, even with technological developments in machine interpretation such as Translatotron, a speech translation introduced to the market by Google in 2019, such tools still are not fluid enough to be 100% reliable without the assistance of a human linguist. This is especially true when interpreting to and from the Arabic language.

Most Translation Work Can Be Done Remotely

While many employers have unfortunately had to dismiss staff in astounding numbers over just the past two weeks. This is tremendously unsettling and even essential business that will not shut down will eventually feel the ripple effect of many markets coming to a screeching halt.

Many Arabic translators freelance and work from anywhere, but even employees who are accustomed to working full time in offices have found it easy to simply bring their work home and continue the business. Translation software, project management apps, and cloud systems make it easy for translators to log in from their living rooms and collaborate with other people on their teams. Although there were be delays with processing visas and immigration cases, basic Arabic translations like birth certificates, marriage certificates, medical records, etc. can still be done and filed with other paperwork online.

Additionally, more complex translations, quality checks, Arabic audio transcription, and other tasks will be able to be completed, even if there’s additional preparation needed to perform the work outside of the normal environment.

Networking In These Times

If you’re a translator looking for work, or you are in need of Arabic translation service, use your network. If you don’t have a network, get online and get to it. You can’t even use self-imposed quarantine or actual lockdown as an excuse not to since there are so many wonderful online platforms you can jump on to find opportunities.

Make sure you’re visible on LinkedIn, ProZ, and TranslatorsCafe. Also, there is nothing at all wrong with looking for work but try not to be spammy. If you connect with someone online, introduce yourself politely and briefly. Also, try to build relationships with project managers, business owners, and translation team managers. If they don’t have a position to offer you at the moment, you can ask if they mind you checking in with them periodically (every six weeks or so) to see if they could use your support. They probably will not mind.

You may want to avoid posting your resume directly online since it can compromise your personal identity or write posts about needing work. Instead, ad value to your network by posting information and helpful tips, and you will find people are more willing to approach you when they need help.

Don’t Be Discouraged

There is no doubt that across the world, we are in the midst of some dark days. But don’t despair. Economic ups and downs, hard seasons, and the like come and go. We have gotten through tough times before, and we’ll get through these, too.

And one final positive thing we can dwell on is that in our lifetime, we can pretty much guarantee that there’ll always be translations.

Originally published at https://sastranslations.com on March 23, 2020.