Article by Sarah Hickey.
The language services industry is a diverse space by its very nature as its primary purpose is to connect people from a vast number of language and cultural backgrounds. Communication is at the core of all human interactions and where there is a need for communication, there is a need for language services. If we consider all the potential scenarios and ways in which people communicate, it should not come as a surprise that there is a whole array of language services which goes far beyond the well-known, traditional translation services — the bread and butter of the industry.
In fact, for our Nimdzi 100 ranking of the largest language service providers (LSPs) in the world, our definition of language services includes:
Translation, localization, transcreation, multilingual desktop publishing (DTP), language quality assurance, linguistic testing, multilingual copywriting, multilingual technical writing, language project management, interpreting, video remote interpreting, telephone interpreting, linguist verification and staffing, media localization, versioning, adaptation, subtitling, voiceover, dubbing, machine translation (MT), training machine translation engines, cultural consulting, data services, and related services.
After recently publishing an update to our graph that shows the market split by industry verticals, we decided that it was high time we do the same for the main services in the language industry. The percentages are based on our overall estimate of the global market size for all language services. We estimate that the language services industry reached USD 64.7 billion in 2022 and should grow to USD 69.3 billion in 2023.
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Download Print Version (4.7 mb)How to read this chart
- The chart provides an estimated market split based on revenues from language services per service type. These totals were then weighed up against our overall market size for the global language services industry.
- Companies with larger portfolios are listed first for each service type.
The chart is based on data obtained via responses to The Nimdzi 100 survey earlier this year and on annual reports of publicly traded firms.
This article was prepared by Nimdzi's VP of Research, Sarah Hickey. If you wish to learn more, reach out to Sarah at [email protected].
