What Is an “LSP” (Other Than a Misnomer)?

What is an LSP? When I saw the term “an LSP” for the first time about a year ago on a translator’s blog, I did not know what it meant. Most people who read this blog will probably know that “an LSP” means a Language Service Provider, but that it is because most people who somehow end up on this blog are translators. Not many non-translators (or non-LSPers?) know what this English abbreviation means.

When I Googled LSP,  I got back a lot of interesting suggestions, such as Louisiana State Police, Latino Studies Program, Liskov Substitution Principle (whatever that means), Landowner Stewardship Program (whatever that means!), Legal Services Program (that sounds like a scam), Life Sciences Partner (an equity fund), Label Switched Path (that sounds like patentese, ergo it must be patentese)  … even a Lunar Soil Propellant (I am not even going to try to guess what it could mean), but nowhere in the first 10 (ten!) pages of helpful suggestions from Google was I able to discover that LSP can also mean a Language Service Provider. A website that explains what different abbreviations mean lists 35 possible meanings of the abbreviation LSP at abbreviations.com, but Language Service Provider is not listed.

LSPs used to be and sometime still are called translation agencies, which is a term that anybody can understand. But for some reasons, translation agencies do not want to be called that anymore. They started calling themselves LSPs and many if not most translators started imitating them and dutifully call them now LSPs too, possibly to demonstrate to the yet uninitiated public that they too belong to the club of insiders who are well versed in the professional lingo of the brave new translation industry.

I wonder, who was it who came up first with this abbreviation? I can only speculate why the industry started replacing the word “agency” with the abbreviation “LSP”. I think it was probably because “agency” sounds like a mediator, a facilitator, a broker, which is of course what they are, rather than a creator. A language service provider does not really provide the service in this case, it is the freelance translator or interpreter who provides the service, the LSP buys and then the sells the service for a profit. So the new term was probably designed to obscure the reality, sort of like when the Blackwater Corporation changed its name to “Xe” (which is pronounced “zee” in English but differently in other languages).

One of the problems with the English language is that people who speak it for some reason seem to really like abbreviations and acronyms a lot, even when there is no reason not to say the whole word or all the words so that everybody would know what the term means. For instance, a gynecologist is called an OB/GyN in English (sometime without the slash), which I find kind of strange. Why not use real words in English? Don’t we have enough words in the English Language? There are 171,476 “full word” entries in the Oxford English Dictionary. Why not use these or other words instead of abbreviations that only a few people will understand? The Japanese word for gynecology 婦人科医 (fujinkai)  has all the characters  that one needs to understand what the word means (fu = woman, jin = person, ka = science, i = medicine). Now that’s a language that makes sense to me. Most European languages use some variant of “gynecologist” which preserves the Greek words “gyne” = woman and “logos” = word, which must mean that a gynecologist is somebody who likes to talk about women a lot. But English is a language that likes to throw nonsensical or ambiguous abbreviations at people. And don’t get me started with other newfangled abbreviations, such as LGBT (which stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual & transgender for those who don’t know).

But let’s get back to LSPs. In my opinion, it make sense to use abbreviations for technical terms that are simply too damn long. For example, everybody knows now what a USB port is, although not that many people probably remember that “USB” stands for “Universal Serial Bus”. The same thing could be said about sort of ugly but really useful acronyms or abbreviations such as Hi-Fi, Hi-Def, or URL.

But why use an abbreviation that nobody who does not in fact work in the industry understands, unless you are trying to hide something, or unless you are pretending that you are something that you are not, namely a “provider” (as in “Language Service Provider”).