This chapter focuses on the contributions of economists to the selection, design, and evaluation of language policies, particularly since the late 1970s. We show how to perform status analysis using available data on earnings, language skills, language of work, and language of consumption. Then, we turn to the evaluation of the costs and benefits of language policy measures. We add a section on the use of stylized data, an approach common in economic theoretical modeling and empirical evaluation. Finally, this chapter discusses some challenges in understanding the role of economic processes in language issues.

What Do We Mean by Status?

The signalling of qualifications can be seen in the following recent developments, cited here as mere examples:

Here we move from the description of what is being done to an outline of what can be done, before attempting to formulate what should be done.

If there is to be a policy or some kind of public intervention regarding the existing mechanisms for signalling the status of translators, what are the basic options available?

Free Market or Controlled Entry?

The first fundamental question would seem to be whether this should be an entirely free market, where anyone can translate, or if there should be formal restrictions on who can be allowed to translate in exchange for financial recompense.

Bearing in mind that most people in the world are plurilingual, and since translation is one of the basic things that people do with language (alongside speaking, listening, writing, and reading), there can be little question of restricting the activity of translating. On the contrary, generalised translating should be encouraged, as empowerment in the field of cross-cultural communication. The availability of free online translation memories and machine translation services, together with web-based software for collective volunteer translating (“crowdsourcing”), means that generalised translating can be expected to expand, whether we like it or not. Our question here cannot concern restricting an activity, or controlling who can or cannot be paid for a service. It more exactly concerns the efficiency and effectiveness of the possible mechanisms for signalling status.

Here we sketch out case studies of the way the various signalling mechanisms interact in Germany, Romania, Slovenia, the United Kingdom, and Spain, as well as the external comparison countries the United States, Canada, and Australia.

The case studies broadly address the following questions:

We look at the general language policy of each country, the main features of academic qualifications, the professional associations, and the specific systems in place for sworn or authorised translators. In each case, we propose some tentative conclusions about the ways academic and professional signals are working, especially in relation to the size of each potential market.

The United States, Canada, and Australia have been selected as comparison bases because they have all seen close critical attention to accreditation and certification systems in very recent years.

Germany

Germany is a significant case study because of the specific weight of the German economy within Europe, its successful export orientation, its high levels of foreign-language competence, the presence of immigrant languages, and a well-established and generally successful system of translator training and associative representation.

Some of the data collected in the course of this research indicate the need for a reality principle with respect to the rough numbers of professional translators and interpreters that could be working within a given national or regional industry. For example, when the Romanian Ministry of Justice lists 32,856 “certified translators and interpreters”, it is difficult to see how so many people could be translating in an economy of that size. Similarly, the 2008—10 statistics for Australia show NAATI certifying 1,856 people a year as translators and interpreters, in a country where the main translator association has only about 500 members. Some kind of measuring stick is needed to tell us when such figures seem incorrect or should be attributed to special factors.

One available instrument is particularly blunt but potentially useful. Parker (2008) estimates the “latent demand” for translation and interpreting services in all the countries (and for 2000 cities!) in the world. This basically means estimating the size of the translation and interpreting industry in “efficient” high-income countries for which data are available, then relating the size of the industry to national income, and finally applying that formula across the globe, as if language services were a function of no more than macroeconomic indicators. Despite those very naive assumptions, the numbers may act as a garde-fou for other cross-country comparisons.

The above case studies present the ways the various signalling mechanisms interact in different countries. Behind the synchronic regional variation, it is possible to see translators gaining status in a general historical process, which plays out in different ways in different situations. To understand that general historical process, we turn to the sociology of professions, and more particularly to various models of diachronic professionalisation.

Most of the models have historically been based on professions in the United States, and the most relevant applications to the general field of translation are actually from the greater China region (Tseng 1992, Ju 2009, Chan 2012) and the United States (Witter-Merithew and Johnson 2004), in both cases with reference to interpreters. Here we review the models and the applications, then we attempt to adapt them to the recent history of translators in Europe.

Models of Professionalisation

Professionalisation can be understood as the process whereby occupations seek to upgrade their status by adopting organisational and occupational attributes and traits (US National Center for Education Statistics 1997). As early as 1928, Carr-Saunders defined professionalism (later more commonly referred to as “professionalisation”) as “specialized skill and training, minimum fees or salaries, formation of professional organizations, and code of ethics governing professional practices” (1928: 8).

The status of translators is not to be confused with how well anyone translates. It concerns the perception of a translator's value — what people think a particular translator can do, and how well or badly the translator is assumed to do it.

Seen as such, the question of status is extremely important because, almost by definition, someone who needs a translator cannot judge objectively how well that translator performs. Translations are among the products and services, perhaps along with used cars and legal services, where the buyer does not have direct knowledge of what they are buying — they have to rely on what people say, or on what the translator looks like, or on the translator's academic qualifications, or their membership of professional associations, or their official certification. That is, status is created by a set of social signals, which come in many shapes and sizes. Without those signals, the users of translations would be involved in an endless process of trial-and-error, as can indeed happen when buying a used car or trusting a lawyer.

These days the question of status is of particular importance because, with a website and business model, virtually anyone can start certifying translators. It is not excessively hard to supply novice translators with the external trappings of a profession: an official stamp, a place in an official-looking list, perhaps letterhead paper or a corporate email address.

Translation has received very little attention in economics. Existing contributions can first be arranged in two main categories as follows:

DESCRIPTIONS, backed up by more or less extensive quantitative data, of translation as an economic sector; the quantitative information, which is usually arranged by target language or by country, variously contains estimates of:

— the number of persons involved in the profession;

— the annual turnover of more or less narrowly defined translation services;

— the volume of output (words, pages, etc.).

Such descriptions are usually not produced by (academic) economists and are generally due to professional associations.

ANALYTICAL WORK providing theory-based explanations of some aspect or other of translation perceived as a “product” in the economic sense of the term. This work is more likely to be due to academic economists, although some contributions have come from scholars in sociology or in the language disciplines, who have adopted an economic perspective in their research on translation.

The expression “analytical work” should also be understood in a broad sense, encompassing both strictly theoretical work (usually in the form of algebraic modelling, with a focus on investigating the nature of the relationships between variables) and empirical work, in which statistical data are used to test the propositions generated by theoretical models.

Here we summarise the results corresponding to the following questions: 1) the status of translators in the various census, taxation and job-description systems. 2) the relative status of academic qualifications and training, 3) the status of sworn or authorised translators, and 4) the role of professional associations.

These results are followed by a series of case studies, where the four questions are answered in terms of more or less unified national signalling systems.

What is the Status of Translators in Official Categorisations?

General classifications of economic activities

In the “Statistical Classification of Economic Activities in the European Community” (NACE) we find “Translation and Interpretation” listed as a separate category (74.3), alongside “Specialised design activities”, “Photographic activities” and “Other professional, scientific and technical activities”. This classification is picked up in some of the national listings (in Croatia, Poland, Portugal and the United Kingdom, for example) and in principle should apply throughout the European Union.

The International Labour Organization has an International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO-88) in which translators and interpreters are categorised in major group 2 “professionals”, sub-major group 24 “other professionals”, minor group 244 “social science and related professionals” and unit group 2444 “philologists, translators and interpreters”. This classification has been reported as being used in Austria.

The focus of this study is mainly on the more traditional signalling systems, the ones attached in some way to political states. It would be naive, however, to overlook the reasons why new systems are developing, notably through Internet technologies.

Informants in various countries, especially in central Europe, report that translators are receiving information and networking less through national associations and more through online sites. Some sites, like LinkedIn and Facebook, provide social networking. Other sites, however, provide an additional range of services for translators and basically function as marketplaces where clients can find translators. Here we review the way status is constructed in the main sites, presented in order of claimed number of translators.

ProZ

Founded in New York in 1999, ProZ.com claims to have “over 300,000 professional translators and translation companies” in 2011. Anyone can sign up for free, but full membership costs US$129 a year. Since the huge number of “translators” listed (i.e. everyone who has signed up for free) would seem to exceed market demands, there must be doubts that all the translators have the same professional status. ProZ has been particularly innovative in the development of signalling devices, which come with their own names-for-things. Members ask questions about translation problems, and when a member answers a question satisfactorily, they gain kudos (or KudoZ) points; the number of points accumulated thus signals relative expertise.