Translation industry facts and trends (2022)

When dealing with growth in a company, then the international markets become a topic once a time.

For companies to plan to expand the business globally, there is a need to use different languages for their business.

There are thousands of languages in the world, but which are the ones matter for global companies?

Finally, you get the answer here and some interesting translation industry statistics in a simple overview.

So, without further ado, here's a summary of the most interesting and mind-boggling statistics concerning this growing line of business.

• Market size of translation industry
• Statistics about global business environment
• Efficiency statistics when using a software
• Facts about using artificial intelligence (AI)
• Statistics about translation memory, the persistent use of already translated content

Translation industry statistics

The translation industry are all the companies serving written translation material or offer interpreting services for languages.

Document translation and website localization, which is the translation of website content into languages for use in various countries while taking into account distinct cultural and linguistic aspects, are examples of industry services.

1. Global language services market reached a value of US$ 62.6 Billion in 2021. It’s an incredible growth of 25% since 2019. (IMARC)

2. The biggest market is the US with 7 Billion market size as of 2021. (ibisworld)

3. In the US translation services industry, there are working 103’700 employees. (ibisworld)

4. From 2020 to 2030, the employment of interpreters and translators appears to increase by 24%. In general the industry will increase also. (U.S. Bureau of Statistics)

5. The healthcare end-user group dominated the language services industry. (PR Newswire)

6. On average, a human translator will charge $0.12 - $0.20 depending on the kind of translation as stated in blog post translation rate per word.

Adoption of technology to improve language translation process efficiency is a significant driving factor influencing the global language services market growth.

The expansion of the worldwide language services industry would be hampered by open-source language service technologies. The rising availability of open-source translation services is a key impediment to industry expansion.

Globalization nice to know’s

1. 76% of consumers from 29 countries prefer to buy products where information is provided in their native language according to study in 2020. (CSA Research)

2. Local language support a long-lasting relationship of your company with the consumer, according to the same study. (CSA Research)

3. The markets with the highest online sales potential are United States, China, Japan, Germany and United Kingdom. These countries make almost 60% of all online sales potential. (Imminent research)

4. 90% of the online sales potential are only distributed over 35 countries and only 17 languages. (Imminent research)

5. Asia has more than 2.7 billion Internet users in 2021 alone, Europe had 740 million and the US had 350 million. (Statista)

6. 23% more English speakers, not only native, from 2011 until 2021 worldwide. (Statista)

For a company which is planning to expand to global markets, the localization and translation of online information is very important. Anyhow, there are priorities to set to reach the most consumers out of localizing only a few major languages.

Although the Asian part of the world have the most internet users, the online purchasing power is 20% higher in the United States. So the number of users is not always the right statistic for developing a globalization strategy.

If you are a project manager in need of human translators. Visit our find a translator page.

Content localization statistics

1. 94% of marketers surveyed in the U.S. and Europe citing plans to increase spending on content localization in the coming year. (Smartling)

2. Nearly 40% of those surveyed disclosed that their organizations are spending $500,000 or more annually on content localization. (Smartling)

3. 27% of tech CEOs wish they had created a dedicated marketing resource to develop localized marketing campaigns. (Gartner)

4. Three out of five marketing leaders think the missing content localization has negative impact on their customers relationships. (marketingcharts.com)

A professional content localization process will enable the entire business to understand the needs and wants of consumers. As well, it would improve product innovation, engagement, and the conversion rate.

Most of the marketers are aware that there is a lack in localization for their company and that there is negative impact on engagement with customers. On the other hand, the companies also plan to increase their budgets for this topic.

Machine translation market size

The process of automatically translating text from one language to another without human intervention is known as machine translation.

The need for cost-effective and high-speed translations, as well as developments in artificial intelligence in Europe and the United States, are driving growth in machine translation.

1. The market size for machine translation was USD 800 million in 2021. (Global Market Insights)

2. The forecast of the market size growth for machine translation from 2022 to 2030 is 30%. (Global Market Insights)

3. 68% use a free online machine translation tool, based on a study with professional translators, teachers and language service providers. (De Gruyter)

4. In the same study, a Spanish sample was translated with machine translation and the participants had to decide if the result was good or bad. All the participants agreed that the result was acceptable, but there was a need of postediting. (De Gruyter)

5. With 43.69% is Google Translate the most popular machine translation provider. (Datanyze)

6. Asia Pacific is the most growing region for machine translation. (Mordor Intelligence)

7. North America holds the highest share of machine translation market in 2021. (Mordor Intelligence)

Check out this infographic to see where machine translation is gaining the greatest traction:

Translation memory statistics

Translation memory helps you to save time and keeping your translations consistent. It can also reduce any localization budget enormously by reducing the effort needed to translate content again.

1. Translators can increase productivity by 30% to 40% using translation memory. (Monterey Institute of International Studies)

2. Most useful is a translation memory for technical content, because normally contain a huge amount of terminology, basic expressions and simple sentence structure. (ResearchGate)

3. A multinational company from Germany could reduce it’s translation cost with a translation memory by 30%. (Monterey Institute of International Studies)

Check out how you can configure the translation memory that we recommend.

It has excellent performance because it runs in the browser. You can also employ translation memory between projects, which means you can use all translations across all of your projects.

Trends in the translation industry

Marketers & AI

The translation sector overcame recent problems and shown development. Growth is also anticipated in the following years.

Above all, open source tools will stifle market growth. On the other hand, many marketers see the need of investing in localization. Many are even convinced that they are investing much too little.

Machine translation will continue to drive technological advancement and, more crucially, will occupy post-editing services tasks. The AI-translated text is passed on to a translation agency or translator for final processing.

Communication and process structure will be important considerations. Because post-editing introduces an entirely new interface to the business.

Therefore, the good news for translators who are concerned that technology could one day replace human translators is that only sections of the translation task can now be automated.

The rise of e-learning

The industry will benefit greatly from e-learning services, which will gain prominence during COVID-19 and will continue to do so.

One of the best things about e-learning technologies is that everyone, no matter where they are, may access your information.

With online learning becoming more widespread, these platforms must ensure that their audiences have the best possible opportunity to connect with and learn from their material.

As a result, e-learning has emerged as one of the most important translation industry developments.

Multilingual SEO strategies

The process of optimizing SEO in various spoken languages, such as a website or video content, is referred to as multilingual SEO.

Multilingual SEO tries to improve the organic search results of material in a certain language.

The most important thing to remember is that you must first and foremost develop fantastic content that is relevant to the local market. Which is nearly impossible without a good translation software, a freelance or professional translator. Start to find a translator right now.

You should also devote some work to technical matters, such as selecting the proper URL structure or including hreflang tags throughout your website code.

For your project

The translation business will continue to increase as a result of globalization.

THE MOST IMPORTANT: If you want to attract worldwide audiences, you should use a translation management system in conjunction with translation services to localize your content.

With our online translation services, we are the marketplace where translators find jobs and companies looking for high quality translation work.

In addition, our translation management system will assist you in initiating your continuous localization process in order to expand globally.