The 140-page Slator 2023 Language Industry Market Report provides a comprehensive view of the global language services and language technology industry — an addressable market of USD 27.9bn in 2022, according to Slator’s research.
The language services and technology market remained resilient in 2022, despite macroeconomic and global uncertainties, growing 4.77% from the prior year. The first half of 2022 accounted for a significant portion of annual growth, as demand began to soften in the second half of the year.
The 2023 Language Industry Market Report is Slator’s annual flagship report. It analyzes the language industry through the lens of ten primary buyer verticals, listing top growing verticals by percentage and US-dollar growth. A geographic analysis lists market share and percentage growth per region and identifies the fastest-growing markets in North America, Europe, and Asia.
Slator also applies a buyer intentions framework to the industry, using a one-page matrix to map the concentration of specific buyer intentions across the 10 verticals, providing readers with a deeper understanding of language industry dynamics.
Next, the report analyzes the market from a language services perspective, with an infographic showing more than 200 core and adjacent services provided by leading language service providers (LSPs).
Report buyers and Slator Growth, Pro and Enterprise subscribers are invited to join a complimentary Briefing about the report’s key findings on Wednesday, May 24, 2022.
Slator 2023 Language Industry Market Report
140-page flagship report on market-size, buyer-segment analyses, sales and marketing insights, language tech insights, and more.
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Analyzing data from the Slator 2023 Language Service Provider Index (LSPI), which features nearly 350 LSPs, the report examines the competitive landscape of LSPs by segment — Super Agencies, Leaders, Challengers, and Boutiques — and includes an analysis of growth and market share in 2022.
The report sizes the global interpreting market, outlining demand drivers in the US, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. We identify trends shaping US healthcare interpreting and cover the impact of remote interpreting and speech-to-speech innovations.
We outline the state-of-play in the core translation technologies of machine translation and translation management systems. We analyze players, trends, and business models, and show how large language models (LLMs) fit into the picture.
Additionally, the report covers the industry’s 2022-3 M&A and funding environment and unpacks the strategic rationales and drivers that underpinned 2022’s major deals. An expert-in-the-loop chapter analyzes the extent of post-edited MT across the industry, and describes the impact on linguist roles.
The dynamics of the captioning and transcription market are captured in a 15-page chapter. We show how speech-to-text technology is expanding use cases, encompassing accessibility, engagement, and business analytics. We identify leading players and business models, and assess the barriers to entry, risks and synergies for LSPs.
In a game localization chapter, we unpack the drivers and trends underpinning this rapidly-growing vertical and provide valuable insights into how localization buyers formulate their localization strategies.
The future of dubbing is then assessed in an AI dubbing chapter. We examine technology, workflows, and applications, and consider AI dubbing’s potential impact on media localization.
The spotlight then turns to LLMs in a 25-page chapter that homes in on early movers; industry players that are already performing pilots and implementing LLMs’ powerful capabilities. We shed light on the LLM abilities and applications that are promising to transform the industry.
The current state of LLM adoption by LSPs is revealed in a survey of leading providers. We also consider how LLMs will impact demand drivers and marketing positioning. We focus on multilingual text generation and its potential to disrupt traditional translation drivers — and create new opportunities.
The report presents a market outlook, which estimates five-year market growth under conservative, neutral, and optimistic scenarios. Lastly, the report outlines the segments of the industry that are best positioned to win in the midterm as the industry grapples with transformative AI technology and macroeconomic uncertainty.
Table of Contents
| Language Services Industry Analysis | 6 |
| Obtain the latest language industry intelligence, from industry size and percentage growth to market size per vertical, geographic region, and buyer intention. Find out how demand is concentrated across these segments to gain a deeper understanding of the dynamics shaping the industry.
Browse a timeline of key events shaping the language industry through 2022 and 2023 — from major deals and people moves, to product launches and large language model (LLM) releases. |
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| Competitive Landscape: Services | 22 |
| Read up on the language industry services landscape, including market size and growth per LSP segment. Find out the fastest-growing LSPs and gain an understanding of the services that underpin the language industry, with a one-page infographic listing more than 200 core and adjacent services.
Gain insight into barriers to entry, synergies, and challenges for LSPs that compete in adjacent markets, with a one-page profile of seven key adjacent services. |
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| Interpreting Services and Technology | 32 |
| Get to grips with the diverse types of interpreting and market dynamics in the US, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. Find out six major trends transforming the massive US health interpreting market. Learn about remote interpreting solutions and the newest applications of speech-to-speech technology. | |
| Machine Translation | 41 |
| Explore the rapidly-evolving machine translation (MT) ecosystem with a one-page map of key players and business models — from pre-trained models and self-service customization to fully managed MT services and large language models (LLMs). Access a list of the most essential MT research highlights and influential MT papers as of 2023. | |
| Translation Management Systems | 48 |
| Identify the macro-trends currently shaping the translation management system (TMS) market. Discover how integrations are driving TMS revenue and sealing deals, see how MT and TMS players are now converging, and get the latest on M&A and investment activity. | |
| Expert-in-the-Loop | 55 |
| Understand the extent of MT adoption across buyer verticals, delve into the role of specialized linguists in completing the last mile of translation, and seize the opportunities to be found in post-editing at scale. | |
| M&A and Funding | 60 |
| Find out more about the major acquisitions, investments, and startup funding driving and reshaping the industry, and discover the strategic rationales that underpin them. | |
| Captioning and Transcription | 66 |
| Discover the major market drivers for captioning and transcription services and see how speech-to-text (STT) technology is expanding use cases — encompassing accessibility, engagement, and business analytics. Find out how many LSPs compete in this market, and the applicable barriers to entry, synergies, and challenges. Get a rundown on the leading providers and market positioning, and find out three significant factors reshaping market dynamics in 2023. | |
| Game Localization | 82 |
| Understand why the industry’s smallest vertical is also the fastest growing. Unpack the drivers behind game localization and find out how localization buyers formulate their international localization strategies. See where localization fits into the game development lifecycle and learn why the “games-as-a-service” model will influence patterns of production and demand. | |
| AI Dubbing | 92 |
| Get a rundown on the differences between traditional and AI dubbing, and take a deep dive into how AI dubbing works: from voice model creation to automated text-to-speech (TTS). Discover AI dubbing’s key applications and major players. See how advances in AI voices, alongside significant investment in AI dubbing platforms, promises to change media localization. | |
| Large Language Models (LLMs) | 100 |
| Gain a valuable view into the potential of generative AI and large language models to transform the language industry. Find out the early movers who are testing capabilities, performing pilots, and implementing LLMs’ powerful capabilities in products and services.
Access a compact timeline of major LLM releases — from BERT to PaLM, LlaMA, GPT-4, and ChatGPT. Get an overview of the players that build LLMs and deploy them commercially. Find out three key LLM capabilities that are of major consequence for the language industry, and get clear on why prompting is so important. Look ahead to the “hybrid” future of machine translation that meshes LLMs and conventional MT engines. Discover the current state of LLM adoption across leading LSPs and access a list of 30 new AI roles predicted to soon emerge at LSPs. Dive into the future of multilingual text generation: discover the industry verticals most exposed to disruption, and the new opportunities for the language industry to perform expert-review on a rising tide of AI-generated content. Understand how LLMs are priced and the risks and constraints that constitute the broader context for AI adoption. |
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| Market Outlook 2023 | 127 |
| Gain actionable insights into the language industry’s projected growth rate and market size, and find out which industry segments will emerge as winners and losers. | |
| Appendices | 133 |
| In addition to the 120-page body of the report, the report’s appendices feature additional market-size estimates (for G20 countries, Norway, and Switzerland) and underlying LSPI data for LSPI Super Agencies, Leaders, and Challengers. |
Actual View of Report Table of Content
How to Use This Report
Slator’s easy-to-digest 2023 Language Industry Market Report offers the very latest industry and data analyses, providing language service providers, end clients, and investors the confidence to make informed and time-critical decisions. It is a cost-effective, credible resource for busy professionals.