Language services industry

oday, machine translation (MT) is so pervasive that — for many young or early-career localization professionals, at least — it’s hard to imagine a time without it. But such a time did exist. Those with a decade or two of language industry experience under their belt have, no doubt, witnessed firsthand MT’s evolution into the nearly omnipresent entity that it is today.

As of November 2022, everybody in the language industry is talking about ChatGPT. It is an undeniable trend firmly occupying the minds of many. New implementation scenarios and use cases for ChatGPT emerge daily, and GPT-4 has just been released. But will it stay as hyped in the next five years, or will it become as normal as Machine Translation (MT) for us?

The language services industry is a shadow industry that is driving the growth of all global brands. It is a transformation business that does not create anything from scratch but transforms content from all other industries.

Today is International Women’s Day (IWD), a day that originated in the early 1900s as a platform for women to protest against working hours and pay inequality, and for voting rights. Although we’ve seen tremendous progress since then — a century ago, most women in the world lacked the right to vote, and today we have women leading governments — IWD is still accompanied by important protests against continued inequality for women and girls. 

The Nimdzi 100 is one of our flagship publications. It includes a ranking of the top 100 LSPs by revenue, a watchlist of large players that don’t disclose their revenues, and a detailed overview of the size and state of the language services industry. The Nimdzi 100 is widely considered an industry standard and is read by tens of thousands of people in the translation and localization space and beyond. LSPs, localization buyers, investors, savvy job seekers, and analysts will benefit from this free resource.

While we are still working hard to compile this year’s edition of the Nimdzi 100 — the ranking of the largest language service providers (LSPs) in the world — we can already confirm the first six positions on our ranking.

How many language service providers (LSPs) are there in the world? In some ways, this question is similar to asking how many grains of sand there are (though maybe not quite as speculative as that).

Language technology providers are scrambling to jump on the speech-to-text bandwagon which means users can view machine-generated live subtitles (translated from the original) as well as multilingual captions (monolingual transcripts available for different languages)of speeches in their preferred language.

This report is the first in an ongoing Business Confidence Study series that Nimdzi is kicking off to keep a pulse on the industry.

Cologne-based DeepL has announced the beta launch of DeepL Write, an AI-powered authoring tool intended to improve texts by fixing errors and making suggestions for word replacements while keeping an eye on style, grammar and formatting.