Phone Interpretation Resellers Now Selling for the Competition

Some localization providers may soon be implementing the plan shown to the right once they find they are promoting their own competitor.

The world's 4th largest translation and interpretation company is also the world's largest over-the-phone interpretation (OPI) company, Language Line Services (LLS). In recent years, LLS, like many OPI companies, has gained a notable share of its revenues through resellers. Most OPI companies allow for private branding, a necessary offering to language companies that wish to compliment their existing written translation services with OPI services. However, LLS has insisted that its resellers use the LLS brand, and a number of localization companies have agreed to this knowing that LLS has never actively promoted its written translation and localization services. Essentially, it was okay for these L10n companies to promote this complimentary service as long as LLS was never direct competition. All that may now change after LLS completes the purchase of a small localization company. Or it may not. Here are a few possible scenarios:

• Localization companies who are LLS resellers drop LLS and move to an OPI provider that allows private branding
• LLS decides that revenues from these reseller-competitors are lower than what they could obtain from their own localization services, and LLS actually drops these resellers first
• LLS sweeps its new little localization provider (which came as part of a much larger interpretation company) into the back room and life continues as usual without LLS actively promoting localization

The last scenario may be the most likely. But if I were a LLS reseller, I would still be concerned.

Related note: In one of T&I Business's final posts before it was taken offline for two years, we asked Common Sense Advisory why LLS was not included as 4th on the list of the Top 20 Translation Companies. You can read that post here, and you can also see that CSA has since included LLS on the list here. T&I Business can not take credit for this change. There were actually many people who asked the same question of CSA.