Call for Participants in Vendor Metrics

The call: Would you be willing to share detailed information about your company? The information you provide each month would be made anonymous and aggregated into an evolving profile of the language services industry. Summarized information will made available to industry media outlets and to financial, business, and related media to improve their coverage of this industry sector. Data collection for this purpose is commonplace in other industries, including retail, hospitality, airlines, and software.

The commitment: Participants will be asked to complete a monthly online form detailing revenue, margins, expenses, employees, translation volume, geographic coverage, and product offerings. Companies will pay a monthly fee to participate. In return, they will receive access to a full range of online reports about the aggregated dataset.

The history: At a GALA meeting in Brussels in mid-2004 we first discussed the desirability of a formal set of metrics for the language services industry. In June of this year Rose Lockwood presented a plan at Localization World in Bonn for formalizing metrics which we at Common Sense Advisory supplemented with our own OECD-style data collection and the offer of a statistician to analyze the results. In October at the GALA annual meeting we outlined the difficulties in collecting a large enough sample to be statistically significant. We decided to ask companies whether they would like to participate in such a project. This message is that invitation.

Interested? If you are interested in learning more about this program, please register at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=751401501682. There you will be asked for your name and e-mail.