The key driver for offshoring publishing services to India has been the comfort and proficiency with English language. As the Indian publishing BPO industry looks to grow beyond its traditional boundaries of English language and English-speaking geographies, is it possible to tap the vast multilingual publishing market?

Publishing takes place in more than 180 languages worldwide. ValueNotes estimates the offshoring opportunity in multilingual publishing offshoring to be around $2 b.

Apart from the typical offshoreable prepress services that include - typesetting, composition, editorial and design services, the 'language-knowledge specific' services primarily include: Language translation, Content localization and Interpretation.

Current Offshore Scenario

Several Indian publishing BPO vendors have already made beginnings in the multilingual space. Most large vendors have multiple language capabilities, especially for services on the lower end of the value chain. The table below provides the multilingual moves of some of the vendors in this segment:

Most vendors provide services to the STM publishers for multilingual content. This is a traditionally serviced segment by the Indian vendors. Most vendors provide composition or design services. There is a very slim possibility of providing higher value and skill based editorial services like content editing, proof reading etc. to multilingual customers in STM. Multilingual STM publishing has limited scope for offshoring higher value services to India, given the language capability and scalability constraints.

According to Vinay Singh, COO, Thomson Digital, "Multilingual publishing in the STM space is not at all an easy market. Scalability and higher value offerings are a challenge to provide from India. While not highly scalable these services do help provide value-addition to existing customers."

Opportunities Ahead

With increasing globalization, publishers are increasingly looking at selling their products and content in other geographies. Some of the key segments that provide tremendous opportunity include:

• Content localization especially in the K-12 segment.
• Translation and localization in the corporate manuals space.
• Composition and design for magazine publishers especially in European countries.

Says Sasidar, CEO Lyric Labs, a specialist in multilingual services,"Thanks to increasing globalization, the market for multilingual services is on the rise. More language localization and interpretation services are required by a growing number of customers having global presence. Almost all large corporations are a market apart from the traditional publishing segment."

Amongst the various languages, French, Spanish, German and Japanese markets have tremendous potential. However for any vendor looking to expand services and segments, the entire globe is a canvas, when it comes to multilingual publishing!