Here are some interesting facts and numbers about the language industry.

Language Services Market

• The language services market is predicted to reach US$25 billion by 2013.
• North American telephone interpreting providers account for 85% of the combined revenue of the Top 15 global providers.
• The average year-over-year growth rate of the top 20 translation companies in 2007 was 26.68%.
• The total market for outsourced interpreting services stood at US$2.5 billion in 2007, with telephone interpreting worth US$700 million.
• 70% of LSPs employ between one and 10 people, 11% employ between 20 to 99, and the rest employ 101 or more.  Only six firms worldwide employ more than 1,000 people.
• Nearly 90% of companies outsource some or all of their translation and localization work.
• In 2005, there were around 4,000 translation companies with more than five employees in the world; 450 of those were based in the United States.

Translation Technologies

• 20% of medium-to-large LSPs offer a house brand of translation management.
• 67% of language buyers say that a vendor’s automation capabilities are important.
• Content that reaches 200,000 words (roughly 400 U.S. letter-size pages) triggers the need for a translation memory.

Procurement

• About 40% of translation buyers regularly buy from five or more suppliers, while 20% buy from only two.
• Almost one-tenth of software firms fully outsource localization work to a language services provider, specialty coding house or offshore developer.
• Only 26% of companies can formally measure and calculate the return on their localization investment.
• 44% of translation buyers stayed with their vendors for five years or more, with the rest citing far longer relationships.
• Three-quarters of the typical purchaser of translation services have been buyers for six years or less.

Global Marketing

• It would take 83 languages to reach 80% of all the people in the world, and over 7,000 languages to reach everyone.
• Websites offered in only one language can address at most 30% of the total online population.
• Translating into 50 languages provides access to almost 96% of the world’s online residents.
• 72.4% of consumers say they would be more likely to buy a product with information in their own language.
• 56.2% of consumers say that the ability to obtain information in their own language is more important than price.
• 72.1% of the consumers spend most or all of their time on sites in their own language.
• English, French, Italian, German, Spanish and Japanese add up to 88% of the addressable online market.
• More than 99% of what people write, say, or generate never leaves the language in which it was created.
• Websites tailored linguistically and transactionally to the residents of one country can address, at most, 20% of the total world online population.
• Over 70% of software suppliers localize new releases.
• Only 12 of the top 100 global brands and just four of the top 50 U.S. online retailers translated a significant part of their corporate websites in Spanish.

Source: Common Sense Advisory