Our Analysts' Insights

At this time of year, many employees at language service providers are getting ready for their performance evaluations and wondering what their raises will be. Meanwhile, executives struggle to allocate their biggest expense – labor cost – in a way that will retain and attract talent.

To establish fair pay, owners or human resources staff need accurate data to conduct compensation benchmarking within the same sector. Comparing salaries across industries often doesn’t prove to be very useful, because pay varies greatly by sector. A project manager in the information technology field has vastly different responsibilities than one in the translation industry, which in turn explains the potential variation in compensation levels.

Yet, managers often don’t know whether the salaries they offer are in line with industry norms. They also lack benchmarks to develop compensation packages for new recruits, to give raises, or to promote someone internally. In addition, when they want to open an office in a new location, they rarely know how to design an attractive compensation package for that market.

CSA Research launched a survey on compensation for employees of language service providers, covering a wide range of positions such as project managers, in-house translators, localization engineers, marketing, and sales staff. The study is designed to investigate salary and incentive data by title, seniority, level of education, and company size. The resulting report will provide data at the global and regional level but, most importantly, also at the local level. Click here for more information on the study or to take the survey.

This data will update our research on the relationship between business activities and compensation. For example, in our past market studies that polled LSPs from our database of more than 18,000 language service companies, we studied how LSPs incentivize different roles by calculating how much an employee has to receive in base salary in order to earn US$1 in incentive. In our last study, they needed on average US$16 in salary to earn US$1 in incentives (a 16-to-1 ratio). The lower the ratio, the more incentivized the position. Linguists came last in terms of bonuses with a 26-to-1 ratio while executives were the most incentivized with a 7-to-1 ratio.

But do LSPs know what’s the right pay package to attract and retain their staff? Perhaps not. While everyone believes that they deserve more than they’re paid, LSPs need to actively manage compensation expectations so that employees don’t look to competitors. Participation in CSA Research’s compensation study supplies LSPs with this critical data.