ABSTRACT
For many years, worldwide expanding markets have challenged jobs in production and service arenas located in industrialized countries. With the present trend in globalization, we are witnessing the second phase of deindustrialization-outsourcing of white-collar jobs, including the research and development sector (R&D). Although the field of Technical Communication (TC) will benefit from the increased demand for multilingual documentation by global business, the trend to send TC jobs from a high-wage country to countries with a low-wage workforce that speaks the same language (in other words, offshoring) diminishes this benefit. With respect to globally important languages, exemplified by the six U.N. languages, the threat of offshoring applies foremost to English-and Spanish-speaking countries, on a limited scale to countries where Russian, French, and Arabic are official languages, but does not apply to Chinese-speaking countries. Currently, the phenomenon of outsourcing jobs to other countries poses an imminent threat to the TC profession in English-speaking countries; that is, jobs are sent from the United States, Canada, or Great Britain to low-wage, English-speaking countries such as India or China.
