As the use of the telephonic modality is increasing it is allowing users to access an interpreter immediately, regardless of time and location.
[7] British social activist Michael Young noticed that language barriers were leading to substandard services for ethnic minorities at Royal London Hospital, so he obtained grant funding to provide free telephone interpreters starting in 1990.
However, during 2006, the Department for Work and Pensions created the "Pan Government Framework for Telephone Interpreting" (contract reference CAG/912/0181).
Driven by the contract win, thebigword developed the UK's first proprietary telephone interpreting platform in 2007 under the stewardship of Simon Moxon and Jonathan Potter.
[17] By 2008 the value of this Pan Government contract had exceeded £12m, however when considering extraneous areas of public, private and third-sector spend at this time, the UK telephone interpreting whole-market value is estimated at £20m.
Similarly to translation, the diversity of organisations cover generic interpretation, as well as domain-specific services such as legal, medical, pharmaceutical and other technical.
Industry analyst firm Common Sense Advisory estimates that in 2012, the market will be worth $1.2 billion, an increase of 70% from 2007.
Reports and sources such as all of those referenced above rely almost entirely on self-reporting by the service providers in the industry, with no substantive way of corroborating or validating.
Secondly and most importantly, because of the nature of telephone interpreting as an on-demand commoditised service, this industry segment is notoriously incestuous.
This concatenation means that the volumes of business declared in market-wide surveys incorporates a significant amount of double, triple and even quadruple counting.