Want a good racket to get into? Consider this.

In the last decade, translation and interpreting for domestic health care alone have reached $900 million, says the American Translators Association. And that’s just one large piece of a larger pie.

Not only are they big, but translation and interpreting services are getting bigger. “Despite the recession, language services have grown by 15 percent over the last two years,” says ATA spokesman Kevin Hendzel. “It’s one of the very few industries to do so, making it a top 10 growing market.”

It wasn’t always that way.

Seventy years ago, language services were tiny. With exception to high immigrant areas such as New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, there wasn’t really a need for it. Most everyone spoke English. And we were pretty insular as a country, which made for “a pretty small market,” says Hendzel.

After World War II, things started to change. “Once we became a global super power, we became interested in what other nations were doing,” explains Hendzel. “So we started translating newspapers and such into English. That continued through the ‘60s and ‘70s.” (more…)