Language Services Industry

This article is an attempt to capture where our collective psyche is at this point, some five or six months after OpenAI publicly launched ChatGPT, and on the other, to take stock of all the work that still lies ahead of us as we continue to report on, test, and implement this latest piece of technology in our lives.

Simultaneously the smallest continent and one of the largest countries in the world, Australia is a country like no other, as is its language services industry. On the one hand, Australia has one of the highest proportions of immigrants in the world, with more than a quarter of all Australians having been born overseas.

Since ChatGPT’s launch in November 2022, media outlets have been churning out article after article about how generative artificial intelligence (AI) is coming for our jobs. Nearly every week, a new piece comes out in publications like The Atlantic or Business Insider about how ChatGPT will “destabilize” the job market, making certain workers redundant.

Today, 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.

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.