Are Translation Agencies Really LSPs (Language Service Providers) or LSRs (Language Services Resellers)?

I noticed this strange acronym (LSP) for the first time about two years ago when I started reading blogs about translation. Although I have been a freelance translator since 1987, as a relative newcomer to the blogosphere I did not know what this strange thing meant.

As I wrote already in another post, “when [in September of 2011] I Googled LSP,  I got back a lot of interesting suggestions, such as Louisiana State Police, Latino Studies Program, Liskov Substitution Principle, Landowner Stewardship Program, Legal Services Program, Life Sciences Partner, Label Switched Path … even Lunar Soil Propellant, 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.”

The acronym seems to be very popular among translators, most of them like talking in acronyms like LSP and PM (project manager) in comments on blogs, possibly because they are typing on an iPad (which is not really an abbreviation, is it?), while the general public, namely non-translators, also known among translators as “civilians”, have absolutely no idea what this acronym means.

Chris Durban, a financial translator from French based in Paris, explained the origin of these three letters in a comment to a post on my blog here, and also in this explanation in a comment to a post by Jill from Musings of an Overworked Translator in which Chris said among other things this:

The background that I am aware of is as follows: when EUATC, the European Union of Associations of Translation Companies, first floated the idea of a pan-European quality standard for the translation industry (in 2002?), their draft referred explicitly to “translation agencies/companies” as the (sole) parties on the supply side.

So when professional associations of  *translators* got involved (including SFT in France, very ably represented by Jackie Reuss), our reps made the point that if the European standard excluded freelancers from the git-go there was a very real possibility that buyers complying with it would not be able to buy from freelancers. Literally not be able to use them, because the standard referred to “agencies”.

As a result, “agency/company” was changed to LSP, which explicitly covers both freelance suppliers of translation services and companies/agencies supplying same.

I personally don’t like this acronym. First of all, it makes no sense to me to keep using an acronym that is understood only by people who work in the translation industry, i.e. translators and agencies. Since the abbreviation is already 10 years old, one should be able to find easily an explanation of what it means if you Google it. But you will probably only find an explanation of this acronym if you read what bloggers say on their translation blogs.

The second and more important reason why I don’t like this abbreviation is that I think that it is misleading.

Although the abbreviation LSP might have been originally designed to include both translation agencies and translators in the term, it is now used, both by translators and by agencies, only to describe a translation agency. If a translator says about herself “I am also an LSP”, she does not mean that she is also a translator, she means that she is a translator who also functions as a translation agency because the term LSP is now synonymous with the term translation agency.

Many translators operate their businesses like this, including this one. I am both a translator and a translation agency, as I generated about 30 percent of my income last year by buying translations from other translators and then reselling them at a substantial profit to my customers, mostly patent law firms.

So I am definitely also a translation agency, and it is possible, perhaps even likely, that I will be functioning more as an agency than as a translator at some point. I hasten to add that I am not looking forward to that day, if it ever comes, because I am one of those weird people who like being a translator.

On the other hand, the truth is that I am getting lazier and lazier, and I must say that it is kind of nice when most of the work is done for me by other people and all I have to do is proofread it and prepare an invoice. Although I have to pay the translator, of course, often well before I am paid myself, which is the part that I don’t like … but what can you do.

I am only guessing here, but I think that the term LSP was probably designed partly to hide from public’s prying eyes the fact that translation agency is just an agency, a broker, a middleman. An agency is not a provider of translation services, the services are provided by translators, although some agencies add as resellers a useful service to a service that was originally provided by a translator, for instance in my case if they know how to proofread a Japanese patent (which based on my experience is almost never the case).

Stores like Best Buy that sell big TVs and small iPods purchase electronic gadgets like TVs and iPods from manufacturers of these products and then sell them them to direct customers. As far as I know, these stores are called “resellers”, not providers of TVs and iPods.

Translation agencies purchase translations from translators and then sell them to direct clients. Ergo, translation agencies are not the providers of translation services either, they are also resellers of translations that were already sold once to them by the translators.

Perhaps a more honest abbreviation for a translation agency would be an LSR – Language Service Reseller, and the abbreviation LSP should be reserved only for translators who actually provide the translation service, which is often, but not always, sold first to an agency, and then resold by the agency to a direct client.

But this is obviously not going to happen, and even if it did, the chances are that only people who actually work in the industry would understand what these abbreviations mean. This would also in a way complicate things even more since as I noted above, some LSPs would be also LSRs, for example this mad patent translator.

It would make much more sense to me to start calling a spade a spade, an agency an agency, and a translator a translator. But this is even less likely to happen than that a new abbreviation, LSR, will be introduced to confuse “civilians” even more.

Because once people start throwing around silly new abbreviations and acronyms, for some reason they never stop doing that, even if very few people understand what these new shiny things really mean.