Imagine you are a small language service provider (LSP), one of the thousands of translation agencies listed in the Yellow Pages of the world. You are kind-of midlife. Business is tough. You exist because of the words you sell but your word rates are under pressure every year. You’d like to think that you are an entrepreneur: that you are free to make choices. But what choices do you really have? Margins are being squeezed. Machine translation is suddenly the ‘talk of the industry’, and non-professionals – “crowdsourcers” – are willing to compete for your jobs, at least in some industries.
