Facts and Figures

   Language Services Market

• The global market for language services stood at US$26 billion in 2010 (See The Language Services Market: 2010).
• Almost 30 percent of 380 LSPs surveyed expect transcreation services to grow by more than 10 percent (See Reaching New Markets through Transcreation).
• The United States federal government spent US$4.5 billion on outsourced language services from 1990 through 2010 (See Language Services and the U.S. Federal Government).
• 84.8 percent of 144 organizations that buy telephone interpreting services said that interpreter’s qualifications were their single most important factor in vendor selection (See Telephone Interpretation Procurement).
• The two most important elements of translation quality – technical accuracy and a vendor’s willingness to implement feedback – are even more important to buyers than linguistic quality (See Buyer-Defined Translation Quality).
• Companies that are in favor of technology grow nearly three times as fast as companies that have mixed feelings about it or are against it (See Language Service Provider Growth Factors).
• Suppliers with between 21 and 50 full-time employees (FTEs) reported a staggering growth rate of 157.33 percent for the three-year period from 2008 to 2010 (See Language Service Provider Growth Factors).
• Northern European LSPs reported the fastest growth rate at 153.51 percent (See Language Service Provider Growth Factors).
• Ukraine topped our list of the fastest-growing countries with a growth rate of 471.43 percent (See Language Service Provider Growth Factors).
• Almost half of our survey respondents expected to outsource more of their localization engineering work (See How Providers Can Profit from Scalability Challenges).
• Pharmaceutical and medicine manufacturing translation in the US was worth US$75.8 million in 2009, while medical equipment and supplied manufacturing translation was worth US$100.4 million (See How Life Sciences Firms Buy Translation).
• Hewlett-Packard's Application and Content Globalization (ACG) group with 2009 revenues of US$457 million, followed by McNeil Technologies ($404.7 million) and Lionbridge Technologies ($389.2 million) were the top three language service providers globally in 2010 (See The Language Services Market: 2010).

   Translation Technologies

• Twenty percent of medium-to-large LSPs offer a house brand of translation management (See Evolution and Revolution in Translation Management).
• Content that reaches 200,000 words (roughly 400 U.S. letter-size pages) triggers the need for a translation memory (See Beyond Global Websites: Translation).
• Pay-as-you-go MT can cost as little as US$5 per month, while corporate subscriptions can get up to thousands of dollars for a server-based solution (See Beyond Global Websites: Translation).
• About 46 percent of translation and localization buyer survey participants said localization is now more tightly integrated with Agile Development (See How Providers Can Profit from Scalability Challenges).
• Most translation and localization providers discount the per word price by as much as 48 percent when using translation memory to process previously translated text (See Translation and Localization Pricing). 
• For every one million words of content, fully automated machine translation could cost as much as US$220,000 less than human translation (not factoring in post-editing costs) (See The Business Case for Machine Translation).

   Pricing and Procurement

• 72.5 percent of 651 language service providers base their pricing on the source content they receive versus just 13 percent who charge by target language output (See Translation and Localization Pricing). 
• Companies that offer translation services in many languages receive 67.46 percent of the client’s total volume (See How Buyers Manage Translation Suppliers).
• Among the world’s top 10 languages, English into Russian showed the most price compression since 2007 (See Translation and Localization Pricing). 
• To reduce cost of translation, information producers were four times more likely to favor training and professional development over other approaches (See Content Source Optimization).
• On average, buy-side organizations send 8.80 percent of their work directly to freelance contractors than to single-language vendors, which only receive 4.82 percent of the work (See How Buyers Manage Translation Suppliers).
• Most companies rely heavily on outsourcing, spending 60 to 100 percent of their total localization budget on third-party services (See How to Benchmark Your Localization Budget).
• Only forty-two percent of 651 translation providers surveyed said they give some type of discount, based on customer loyalty, frequency, or volume (See Translation and Localization Pricing). 
• European firms were significantly more likely to have relationships of six to 10 years (41.30 percent) with vendors, compared with far fewer of their North American counterparts (17.32 percent) (See How Buyers Manage Translation Suppliers).
• About 41 percent of global product developers said that they expected to contract with more third-party localization companies within the next year (See How to Benchmark Your Localization Budget). 
• Price is not the most important criterion for life sciences companies when they purchase translation and localization services (See How Life Sciences Firms Buy Translation).
• 52.5 percent of buyers engaged two to five vendors. Very few buyers reported relying on just one translation agency (See How Buyers Manage Translation Suppliers).
• Pharmaceutical and medical device companies distrust certificates of accuracy and ISO certifications, relying more heavily on sample translations to assess quality (See How Life Sciences Firms Buy Translation).

   Language Services Profession

• Translation professionals in China saw their income grow by 46.09 percent in 2010, while those living in Russia, Brazil, Israel, and Romania received pay raises of more than 25 percent (See Language Services Industry Compensation).
• About a quarter of 1,135 interpreters in North America earn more than US$50,000 per year (See Interpreting Supplier Staffing Models).
• Firms with US$100 billion or more in revenue gave their employees an average pay rise of 17.37 percent from 2008 to 2010 (See Language Services Industry Compensation).
• 63 percent of translation or localization teams have five or fewer workers (See How to Avoid Getting Lost in Translation).
• Male translators earned an average of US$65,901 compared with their female counterparts, who earned just US$55,790. However, in six countries – Denmark, France, India, Singapore, South Africa, and Switzerland – women earned more than men during each of the three years analysed (See Language Services Industry Compensation).
• Language services is a relatively young profession with nearly half of professionals (48 percent) in their thirties (See Wages of Localization).

   Global Marketing

• 72.4 percent of consumers say they would be more likely to buy a product with information in their own language (See Can't Read, Won't Buy: Why Language Matters on Global Websites).
• Websites of software and computer makers offered an average of 22.4 languages, while social media sites offered 14.7. Companies in retail and apparel industry offered just 6.3 languages on average (See Gaining Global Web Presence).
• The majority of software developers believe scalability will be a major challenge in the next two years (See How Providers Can Profit from Scalability Challenges).
• 28 percent of the top 1,000 global websites offered links to social media sites, with Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube being the most popular ones (See Gaining Global Web Presence).
• Only 12 of the top 100 global brands and just four of the top 50 U.S. online retailers translated a significant part of their corporate websites in Spanish (See Reaching America's e-Latinos).
• In 2009, 41 percent of Alexa’s top sites supported more than one language. In 2010, Common Sense Advisory research found multiple languages on 46 percent – a year-on-year growth rate of 12 percent (See Gaining Global Web Presence).
• 56.2 percent of consumers say that the ability to obtain information in their own language is more important than price (See Can't Read, Won't Buy: Why Language Matters on Global Websites).
• Simplified Chinese forms 16 percent of the top languages group in emerging markets (How Providers Can Profit from Scalability Challenges; February 28, 2011).
• 72.1 percent of the consumers spend most or all of their time on sites in their own language. (See Can't Read, Won't Buy: Why Language Matters on Global Websites).
• 433 of the top 1,000 global websites addressed a single market in a single language with no attempt to address the needs of geo-lingual visitors (See Gaining Global Web Presence).