After having tapped the English speaking countries, business process outsourcing companies engaged in scientific and market intelligence work have begun to explore the potential offered by the non-English speaking market.
The market for non-English work is believed to be huge. However, the shortage of people, who can combine technical knowledge and languages, could mar the prospects.
The $2.6 million Scope e-Knowledge Centre, which carries out work in scientific and database-related areas, has decided to invest in an approach that runs counter to popular perception.
It believes that people with technical knowledge can be trained in a short while to acquire the technical language skills necessary for the BPO work. However, these language skills may be inadquate for even colloquial usage.
Scope's approach evolved gradually. It started by using translators to help its technical people, said Chandu Nair, the company's president and director.
Later, it decided its purpose would be better served by teaching the technical people just enough to carry out their work.
Nair is upbeat about the results of Scope's approach. He said the company recently bagged a deal from a French quasi-government organisation to translate some technical work.
Scope has just begun to concentrate on the BPO market in Europe, and Nair felt the potential there was good enough to give Scope about 25-30 per cent of its revenue in two years.
Not everyone is as upbeat about translation as Scope is. Ashish Gupta, country head of Evalueserve which does some work on intellectual property outsourcing, feels that there were not enough qualified people to help his company really realise the potential.
Evaluserve, however, felt that translation was a significant market. Its recent study said the entire market for "language-sensitive work" will be $14.4 billion by 2010 (the BPO industry's turnover in 2005-06 was $5.2 billion).
The study also said there could be a shortage of trained professionals in India to meet this demand. It said only about one-fourth of 1.6 lakh people needed by 2010 may qualify for the jobs.
Evalueserve does do some translation work, but not on a stand-alone basis, said Gupta.
Nair, however, felt Scope's experience showed that translation could be managed with the available manpower. The economics of translation provide a compelling reason.
Scope's revenue largely comes from helping with database management in both science-related areas and business.
The average realisation in this area is about $12 to $15 an hour. Nair said database work that required translation provided a 30 per cent premium.
Scope's translation is not limited to European languages. Japanese, Korean and Mandarin are other languages where work is expected to come in as considerable scientific work gets published in these languages.
Scope, where engineers make up 87 per cent of the 380-strong workforce, is likely to be watched with interest. If it succeeds, it could open up new opportunities.
The Evaluserve study said for one job created for a foreign language professional, two new jobs would be created for Indian English-speaking professionals.