The Bank of England has just announced a 1% cut in interest rates, is this good or bad news for the translation industry? Amidst much media attention on the state of the economy in the UK and other countries, our perspective is that fluctuating exchange rates make it difficult to plan ahead with any certainty. Paying translators in other countries in USD or Euros has got increasingly expensive for us over the last few months, other UK translation agencies are in the same position. Things were put in perspective for us this morning, whilst making international payments. What should we do, wait for the rate announcement and see whether the pound would rally, or pay everything in sight before the announcement in case the pound weakened further. In the end we took the view that we should carry on as normal, although our imediate expectation of a 1% cut proved right, and our expectation was that this would not help sterling. We will watch with interest what happens next.

Our real problem with international payments is the attitude of UK banks, to payments within the Euro zone, whilst Euro countries can make international bank transfers electronically in most countries, free of charge, UK banks tend to charge heavily for international payments. The result is that we seek to minimise payments through our bank, and prefer to use PayPal.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 4th, 2008 at 8:54 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.