There’s no hard and fast set of rules for why our language pairs are designated as non-standard, but fundamentally it is dictated by a) the amount of work available for that LP and b) the availability of people who can speak both the source and the target and work between them. Here are some examples of why we may have designated an LP as non-standard:
- There aren’t a lot of speakers that speak the target language, so it’s difficult for us to find enough people to build a community and difficult to find enough work to keep this community happy and healthy. This would be the case for something like English to Icelandic.
- There are plenty of speakers that speak both languages, but very few that can translate between them both that we are able to source. This would be the case for an example like Punjabi to Russian.
- There probably are enough speakers to create a community, but the customer has incredibly specific requirements about target language variety that may make it difficult to source appropriate translators within the notice period. This could be the case for something like Serbian to French (CA).