How can the language based services industry achieve growth? If you work in the field of language based services, how can you grow your business in particular? Societal trends such as immigration, government policy, and global economics may combine to affect the demand for language services such as translation and interpretation. Yet such things as these are well beyond the ability of individual translators or even large agencies to affect.

The path to growth may be to first put aside traditional (and therefore potentially outdated) ways of  thinking about the business of translation and associated services. Language based service providers might be well advised to seek to combine their skills with those of other disciplines in order to offer more complete ways of solving problems … those problems that people and organizations care about.

Experiment with this concept by asking yourself what additional complementary service or value added component might be added to the language piece to make the combined offering more valuable. If you have specific ideas, please consider sharing them. I’ll do the same.