Translation Services Market

From government to business to industries, translation service companies are in great demand as effective communications with partners, employees, officials, customers in the language of your target market becomes a necessity. As such it is seen today that inspite of the fact that the translation industry is not an organized industry, with a very low number of professional translators, the translation service market is growing. The American Translation Association (ATA), which was formed solely to help in the growth of translation and interpreting professions, says membership has doubled in the past 10 years to 10,000 because of the growing demand for language translations and translation market.

Translation demand for few languages

Some languages which were in great demand for translation in 1991 (the trend which is continuing even today) is shown below:

As seen above English dominates the market.

Market of MT and HT

The development of both machine translation (MT) and human translation (HT) is based on demand and supply. On the one hand, there is availability of new technology and on the other, socio-political and economic need for change. Despite the advances in technology, machine translation presents only a small percentage of the market. At the beginning of the 1990s the translation market was as follows:

It can be seen from the above table that only 6 million pages were translated through machine translation, whereas through human translation 450 million pages were translated which implied that MT covered only 1.3% of the total. This percentage has not changed much in recent years as well. Market analysts say that MT will remain only about 1% of an over US $10 billion translation marketplace .

According to Allied Business Intelligence, the size of the "human translation" market is around US$11.5 billion and "machine translation" US$134 million in 2007. Software localization reached US$3.4 billion in the same year. Another market segment with strong expected growth is technical documentation.

Japan Translation Market

Japanese language translation took the second position which reflected the importance of the role of Japan in technology and foreign trade. In Japanese language translation, of all fields , technology occupied two-thirds of translation volume at the end of the 1990s:

China's Translation Market

China's translation industry is a big industry and China can now claim to be a translation giant. According to the China Bibliographic Library, between 1978 and 1990, China had published 28,500 kinds of translated works, and the number grew to 94,400 between 1995 and 2003. According to the Translators Association of China, China's translation market is anywhere between US$ 1.3bn and US$ 2.5bn. China's translation industry accounted for 1.33 billion US$ annually in the later part of 1990s, and that number grew to 21 2.53 billion $ in 2005.

Global Translation Market

According to another estimate, the global translation market grosses US$13 billion annually. The Asia-Pacific region has a 30% share of this market. According to a survey by an authoritative US institution, the global translation market has reached gross US$22.7 billion by 2005. As the global reach of Internet expands, the translation market is expected to grow continuously at a staggering rate of 30 percent a year. Europe will continue to be the largest region, with 49% of the market, followed by Asia, with 39%.

The size of the language/translation services market in 2006 and beyond

According to a study made by Common Sense Advisory (CSA), the market for outsourced language services was US 8.8 billion dollars worldwide in 2005, growing at 7.5 percent per year. The CSA made these estimates based on their calculations on the total revenues of the several companies involved in the business, many translators and free lancers, and an estimate of the revenue generated by international marketing agencies, system integrators, consultants, and other service providers who help in translation and localization