Is our world in the midst of a pandemic? Yes.
Is there any light at the end of the tunnel? There’s a lot of hope actually.
Are we sure? Yes, if we look back at the past crises that plagued the world with the purpose of understanding and deriving the right lessons.
What does the current situation look like?
What started as a virus outbreak near the end of last year has now developed into COVID-19 that has been announced a pandemic by the World Health Organization.
As of April 15, 2020, almost 2,014,042 COVID-19 cases have been confirmed worldwide with 491,841 of the infected patients have recovered, according to the latest figures ─ which will have been totally changed by the time you read this article sometime in the near future.
Economic impact
Regional and global pandemics have their toll on people, countries and the world. The SARS outbreak in 2003 infected around 8,000 people, had a death toll of 774, and cost the world economy about USD 50 billion. Likewise, the COVID-19 will definitely have its economic toll ─ which is still not quite clear ─ but will also have a lot of opportunities and positive changes. How? We’ll see.
Social impact
There’s no doubt that a crisis at this global scale will certainly have a large impact, dramatically reordering societies – but not necessarily for worse.
On the contrary, Plagues always drive change, and change could be positive. People will be finding new ways to connect and support each other in times of need; we will certainly see major changes in the level of health-care and maybe on the level of government and state administration.
Lessons from the past
Before the coronavirus crisis, the world witnessed other disasters that impacted people and businesses, and from which we should now derive many lessons on all levels. The second world war, the 9/11 drama, and the 2008 financial crisis are among the major events that reshaped politics, economy, and communities. Let’s now take World War 2 as an illustrative example.
World War II was the most violent and evil military conflict in history, involving, over 6 years from 1939 until 1945, 30 nations and taking the lives of about 70 million people. It created a new world order totally different from the pre-war one. Economically, nations moved after the war into a new model of industry, adopting an attitude of exploring new technologies and business models. After being totally destroyed, many nations, including Germany and Japan, moved quickly to rebuild their outmoded structures and develop new technologies.
Demand for Translation Services
The translation services industry is one of the sectors which have been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Fortunately, translation services are usually delivered by experts working from their homes, which is relatively mitigating the effect of the current work-from-home business model. They, simply, are used to it!
Significantly, the impact on the translation services industry is clearly industry-dependent, and not all sectors have been affected in the same way or to the same extent.
Demand is increasing for translation services in a variety of industries, including;
- Healthcare & medical
- E-Commerce
- Education/eLearning
- Media & entertainment
- Business services
- Personal care & beauty
- Financial & legal
Is Future Trans Impacted?
Big yes ─ if by “impacted” you mean “prepared and ready”.
We’ve always stood out from the crowd of translation services vendors by having an expert team of translators and also by leveraging state-of-the-art translation technology.
At Future Trans, we never have a ‘generalist translator’, but always have an “expert translator” who works in a single ‘vertical’, a single subject matter, a single industry. Therefore, our pool of linguists is classified into medical translators, legal translators, IT translators, etc. It’s our unalterable policy. The result is that we now take pride in having an expert team of professional translators who are native speakers and who always ensure that our clients’ projects are accurately translated, with the swiftest turnaround time.
So, what now? We are taking advantage of the current situation to prepare our linguists and update our technological resources to gear up for the post-corona world ─ which is going to be great.
