Language industry

The language industry is the sector of activity dedicated to facilitating multilingual communication, both oral and written. According to the European Commission's Directorate-General of Translation, the language industry comprises the activities of translation, interpreting, subtitling and dubbing, software and website globalisation, language technology tools development, international conference organisation, language teaching and linguistic consultancy. According to the Canadian Language Industry Association, this sector comprises translation (with interpreting, subtitling and localisation), language training and language technologies. The European Language Industry Association limits the sector to translation, localisation, internationalisation and globalisation. An older, perhaps outdated view confines the language industry to computerised language processing and places it within the information technology industry. An emerging view expands this sector to include editing for authors who write in a second language—especially English—for international communication.

There are language industry companies of different sizes; none of them is dominant in the world market so far.

A study commissioned by the EC's Directorate-General for Translation estimated the language industry in European member states to be worth 8.4 billion euro in 2008. The largest portion, 5.7 billion euro, was ascribed to the activities of translation, interpreting, software localisation and website globalisation. Editing was not taken into consideration. The study projected an annual growth rate of 10% for the language industry. At the time the study was published, in 2009, the language industry was less affected by the economic crisis than other industry sectors.

One field of research in the industry includes the possibility of machine translation fully replacing human translation.

Rates for translation services have become a big discussion topic nowadays when as several translation outsourcers allegedly go in search of cheap labor. Professional associations like IAPTI try to put a stop to this development. Currency fluctuation is yet another important factor.

Apart from this, phenomena such as crowdsourcing appear in large-scale translations.


US President Barack Obama drew criticism after a 2009 White House white paper proposed incentives for automatic translation.