Shipping the Work to India
A recent article in Business Week talks about more and more copyediting being outsourced from Europe and North America to India, because of the lower costs of having editing done there.
It’s not a new issue: faithful readers will remember that I addressed it once already in my post titled Happy Labor Day. But if Business Week has something to say about it, then it’s more of a major issue than it was when I addressed it in 2006.
My friend and colleague, Geoff Hart, has an interesting take on it that I think is absolutely right on:
We’ll never be able to compete with Indian editors on the basis of price, and competing based on quality is unlikely, at least in the long term. Let’s not forget that many Indians are every bit as skilled with English as we are, since it’s often their native language. And with roughly four times the population of North America (and probably a comparable ratio for Europe), there will potentially be four times as many good editors — and four times as many bad ones, of course.
We can offer only two things that Indian editors can’t reliably provide: skill in our local dialect of English, and proximity to our clients. The former is one of those things that translators like to debate, namely whether you can produce prose indistinguishable from that produced by a skilled local. The best translators believe you can, but in my experience (with French), they’re fooling themselves (i.e., judging others based on their own skills). Very few translators can hide their native tongue well enough to fool me. I’ve heard the same observation from several full-time translators whose opinions I respect.
Proximity is no longer such an issue, particularly for those of us who earn more than 90% of our income from clients on other continents whom we’ll never meet. But for some clients, it’s important: they like the ability to phone during regular working hours or request an office visit or otherwise know that we’re available on a moment’s notice. To retain such clients, we need to give top-notch customer service so they have no reason whatsoever to look elsewhere. That’s true of all clients, by the way: the easier we are to work with, the more human nature (i.e., laziness) makes it likely that clients won’t look elsewhere.
Unfortunately, many clients and potential clients see editing as a commodity, and commodities will always be purchased at the lowest price. In the context of this discussion, that means India. These clients aren’t worthy of our time — there are still clients who appreciate our value, and will pay for it. But let’s be realistic: basic copyediting skills, such as fixing subject-verb accords and typos, really are a commodity service. Any editor worthy of the name should be able to fix these problems.
The only thing that allows us to rise above our colleagues and command a premium price is the ability to provide specialized services, and that means we need to find a niche where our expertise is worth the extra money. For me, that’s science editing, and specifically the subset that relates to journal articles written by non-English scientists. I provide heavy substantive and developmental editing (based on 20+ years of working with journals and learning their criteria) along with polishing the language, and for people who need what I provide, a nonspecialist simply can’t compete.
So the question to ask yourself is the following: What do I offer beyond a commodity service? Market that value-add to your clients. It’s no guarantee that you’ll never lose a client to an Indian or other editor with equally specialized skills, but it does reduce the risk.
There’s far more editing work out there than any one group of editors can handle — the trick is to find it. At some point, the amount of editing work required domestically in India will become sufficiently large that Indian editors will begin satisfying the needs of their domestic market first. That should relieve some of the pressure on us Westerners.
Of course, getting from here to there will be difficult. One useful option is to begin capitalizing on another major outsourcing trend, which is seeing much technical writing being shipped to India, where much software and hardware development is going on. (Ditto for China.) All writers need an editor, and for Indian companies (or branches of Western companies) that will be selling their products around the world, localization (culturally sensitive translation) of their documentation will become important. That’s where editors can become extremely useful.
The mills may indeed be closing, but there’s always something you can do with an improved and focused skill-set. Bear that in mind — and visit Geoff online at www.geoff-hart.com. Then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!
Posted in Editing, Technology on July 9th, 2008