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The language services industry is all about providing, well, language services. Services, as a rule, are something that are incredibly hard to patent or trademark. You cannot patent the act of translating any more than you could copyright a verb. This doesn’t mean that translation companies haven’t tried to get a competitive advantage by building and protecting their own intellectual property (IP). Usually this comes in the form of either patenting a technology or a certain workflow process. Most of the time, though, the technologies and the workflow processes are so interconnected that it is difficult to distinguish one from the other.

Technology has continuously transformed language services. The future capacity of companies and individuals to win business and influence the industry depends on having a technological advantage. Locations with hubs of impactful and popular language technologies will attract better talent, create more jobs, and enjoy economic development more than others.

We come across different terms when it comes to media localization. Or is it audiovisual translation? Is there any difference between the two? Audiovisual translation is actually one of the many processes within the wider term of (media) localization.

Nimdzi has gathered responses from over 100 localization decision-makers to understand what are the deciding factors when selecting which language services provider (LSP) to partner with, both on an individual level, as well as what their companies are looking for.

58 percent of respondents in North Africa, and nearly 40 percent of respondents in Sub-Saharan Africa reported that the internet’s lack of culturally and linguistically-relevant content was one of the most significant reasons why these mobile users chose not to access the Internet. In Egypt alone, 70 percent of those surveyed identified this to be a problem.

It’s time to clarify something: Language service providers (LSPs) do not provide translation. They provide vendor management, project management, and sales. This may come as a shock to you. You may then ask why one would hire a language services company to provide translations if that is not even their core competency?

In the business of translation, the most influential factor affecting competition is the LSP (Language Service Provider) concentration ratio. It is a measure of how concentrated the total amount of business is with a small number of firms.

There are 534 million Spanish speakers living in 22 countries, including the US. Territories where Spanish is spoken are diverse and unique, and they have their own geographical, historical, and socioeconomic characteristics. It is therefore not surprising that in each region they use a different variant of Spanish.

We estimate the market for interpreting services in 2019 at USD 7.6 billion. This includes core services such as onsite interpreting, over-the-phone interpreting (OPI), video remote interpreting (VRI), video relay services (VRS), sign language interpreting, conference interpreting, equipment rental for interpreting, and related services.

In 2017, a research report commissioned by Voices.com put the global market for audio recording at USD 4.4 billion.