This is a guest post by The Migration Translators.
For businesses globally there are huge markets that have not yet been tapped. It has been reported that 70% of those that access the web do not speak English, which in numerical terms is at least 1.4 billion people. When these people surf the net they will only be going to websites that are written in their native language or a language they understand but they won’t be accessing websites written in English.
Only 30% of Internet users speak English
Added to this are the large numbers of people who speak English as a 2nd language who, it has been calculated, still prefer to access websites in their native tongue and not English. Similar findings were reported in India where even though there are 50 million English speakers, 75% only look for information on the internet that is presented in their native language.
Companies that are trying to expand globally should take this data seriously and get translators to translate their product information into local languages.
15 to 20% annual increase in language translators
The Common Sense Advisory measured recently the global demand for transcription and translation and discovered it is increasing due to the rise in world cloud traffic and so there is a rise in demand by approximately 15 to 20% annually for language translators.
Global value of translation to top $37 billion by 2018
The military are the top users of translation services and there are 100 firms who paid $427million for translations in 2012 alone. IbisWorld says that by 2018 the value of translation services will be around $37 billion. The United States is the biggest market for current translation services followed by Europe and then Asia which is experiencing a growth spurt. The U.S. Bureau of Statistics estimates that the translation industry will have grown 42% by 2020 since 2010. The reason for this growth is globalization.
Translators constantly worry about the affect of technology but there is no indication that the pace of translator demand is declining as human translators are always required to complete the final publishing phase. At the moment there is a sharp increase in demand for professional translators in particular for Italian, French, Portuguese, German and French with English as the main source language.
East Asian language translators in hot demand
Chinese and Japanese rank jointly second in demand for translation, while Arabic takes up 3rd position. It is not just companies who are seeking translators but governments as well, as they communicate with other countries in relation to trade matters in a vast number of languages. They also have to provide effective communication with refugees and migrants whose families at least might not be fluent in the language of the country they have come to settle.
The types of translation services that are always required include the translation of documents such as product manuals and other accompanying documentation that comes with products. Also documents provided in a digital form about products on a company website that people can access through the internet need to be translated into other languages. This is when companies use translators to help create a greater market for their products. It has been proved that if a company projects its products on the internet in a multitude of languages they can expect revenue growth.
Globalization and immigration stand to ensure that the demand for translation services will remain steady despite competition from the machine translation industry.
The Migration Translators is one of Australia’s most sought after translation companies. We have been a family-owned business for many years and provide translation services in 150+ languages in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth, Canberra and anywhere else in Australia and worldwide.
