Slator Language Industry Job Index (LIJI) Drops Slightly in September 2018

The Slator Language Industry Job Index (LIJI) was developed for the purpose of tracking how employment and hiring activity is trending across the global language industry.

In its second month, September 2018, the Slator Language Job Index (LIJI) is down slightly at 100.05 vs the August 2018 index of 100.74. The baseline is taken to be July 2018 (100) and is used as a starting point from which to measure expansion or contraction of employment and hiring activity across the industry.

The index increased slightly from July to August 2018, in line with observational trends for the month of July, such as active M&A among some of the major language service providers, and increased demand for language resources as a result of major translation deal wins.

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The index decreased by 0.69 points, down to 100.05 in September 2018, just 0.05 points shy of the July baseline (100). Despite the small decrease, there was an uptick among some of the indicators, mitigating the impact of a decrease in others. All of the global job aggregation sites tracked for the Slator LIJI had a significant number of additional job postings vs the previous month, for example.

Across the LinkedIn people categories, the number of profiles included under the Translation and Localization category was down marginally, while the number included in the keyword search climbed, suggesting more jobs activity on the buy side, where localization professionals are more likely to register under a category other than Translation and Localization, than on the vendor (language service providers and freelancers) side.

Meanwhile, August has been a turbulent month in some pockets of the language industry, with a group of language industry representatives going to Washington DC to lobby Congress about employee classification regulations.

In other jobs news, there were new senior hires at thebigword, BTI Studios, Oyraa, GLOBO, Andovar, AAC Global, RWS, memoQ, Today Translations, and Teknotrans. On the startup horizon, analysis of the Translation category on AngelList looked at the popular locations and business cases for the 219 bona fide translation startup ideas on the site, a platform meant for startups, angel investors, and job seekers looking to land positions in up and coming companies.

Slator LIJI relies on LinkedIn for a substantial part of the underlying data. The site has some 500 million users, many of whom share data about their skills, experience, location, company and job title on their personal LinkedIn pages. The site has over 600,000 profiles under its Translation and Localization category and a search for the keyword Localization also yields over 600,000 profiles.

In addition to using data from LinkedIn, the Slator LIJI is based on data from a range of sources including global job aggregation sites, and additional direct company data collected from Slator LSPI companies.