Recently, one global player in translation bought out a competitor. Another key player was court-ordered to break up and sell their company. These business developments—and more—set me to thinking: What, exactly, does the buyer get when acquiring a translation company? What is the market value of a given translation company as a whole? And how does the market put a price on a company’s individual assets?
In part I, we defined the pivot language approach, discussed briefly its major drawbacks, referred to factors regarding the selection of the pivot language and explored two areas where pivoting can be deployed i.e. the relay interpretation (oral) and the human translation (written), including translations from audio recordings with or without script. In part II of this blog article, we will discuss more areas where pivot languages can be deployed, namely in building and enhancing bilingual lexicons, translation memories, machine translation systems and machine transliteration systems.