Home › Knowledge Center › What is The Size of the Translation Industry?
How big is the translation services market? Which are the most demanded languages? What trends can we identify in the translation industry? In short, what is the size of the translation industry? We will address these and other questions in our “Knowledge” section about the translation industry.
The good news for translators who worry about the technology may one day replace human translations is that only parts of the translation job can be automated by now. Despite huge advancement in technology, machine translation is an enabler to do translation faster or used for gisting, but not for final professional publishing. It is not expected that in the near future translations will be entirely automatic translations.
The increase in the demand of professional translation services is high. Taking English as the source language, the demand for frequently translated languages such as French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish will remain particularly strong. The most widely used Asian languages such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean will also remain in high demand. Arabic and other Middle Eastern languages will rank in a third position. In the 21st century, companies and governments must communicate and publish regularly (often in several languages) with existing and potential customers, business partners, even employees woring in other countries. This has shielded the translation industry and has turned it in a refuge from economic downturns. Despite downwards pressures because of worldwide recession, demand has actually grown steadily in the past few years. For example, multilingual online publishing has provided a tool for many SMEs to enter previously untapped markets.