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CEO DA Languages
2025 was another strong year of growth in UK Interpreting. Ever more public bodies recognise the value that investment in Interpreting brings: preventing hospital re-admission, preventing re-offending, and ensuring justice is served. The final quarter of the year was affected by UK Government budget speculation. Now that clarity has been provided, better investment decisions can be made. It’s imperative to keep looking forward and relentlessly evolve Technology offerings, without which it’s not possible to compete at scale.
In the UK there has been a welcome step up in professionalism of procurement and increasing expectations of Interpreting services. Quality in high acuity / critical content scenarios where outcomes affect lives only comes via the complex human-centric skills of Interpreters. These events require ever more sophistication to deal with emotions, conflicts of interest, and non-verbal signals to ensure everyone is understood.
With machine interpreting a gap has emerged between perception and reality. Front line users of interpreting in healthcare and justice, rightly, are not prepared to compromise safety or quality by adopting a limited technology solution in isolation. Due to the multi-dimensional challenges in interpreting settings, humans are always going to be required to take responsibility when serious decisions about peoples’ lives are at stake.
2024 has experienced continued growth in UK Public Sector interpreting. New public sector bodies have realised the importance and value interpreting can add, and on average, existing clients have double digit growth with no signs of this growth slowing.
Immigration has continued in the UK and across Europe, creating ever more demand on interpreting LSPs. Qualified interpreters are essential to ensure precise communication resulting in better outcomes for our clients and their customers, specifically improving health outcomes and preventing hospital re-admission. Interpreting LSPs will need to invest more in growing their supply chains to keep up with the volume of demand.
Looking back on 2024, two long term investments stand out, people and technology:
- Having great people is the essence of the business and without continuously adding high calibre individuals to the senior team, we would never have kept up with growth opportunities. Over the last 6 years I have strived to maintain a balance with mid-senior hires of circa 50% from industry and 50% new to industry and strongly believe this has helped eliminate complacency.
- Technology is essential to scale. Obviously, technology development of proprietary systems can be expensive, it can take longer than expected, but I was very lucky to receive good advice through 2021 and 2022 around investing in systems for scale and security. Its only years later (2024) when you realise how much that investment has paid off. Tech and people remain strategic priorities.
Finally, throughout 2024 developments in AI continued. Interpreting remains very much a human interaction with vast layers of verbal and non-verbal complexity and currently some strongly divergent opinions continue with regard to how these technologies can complement our industry. I would expect more alignment to emerge in 2025, a great time to be in Interpreting.