Hiring activity in the global language market saw a more pronounced upward trend in March 2022. The Slator Language Industry Job Index (LIJI) had previously experienced only a slight increase in February 2022 after a small seasonal dip in January 2022.
The LIJI was developed to track employment and hiring trends in the global language industry. The July-2018 baseline is the starting point from which expansion or contraction of employment and hiring activity across the industry is measured.
The Slator LIJI climbed by more than three points to 176.6 in March 2022, up from 173.4 the month prior, but remains several points lower than its December 2021 peak of 180.5.
The uptick in the March 2022 figure is linked to an increase in job ads across most of the platforms monitored by Slator. Observational data related to activity across the language industry in the month of February 2022 indicate that the translation, localization, and interpreting hiring environment remains buoyant into the first quarter of 2022.
Funding, LSPI Growth, LocJobs
In February, M&A transactions covered by Slator were outnumbered by Funding rounds, as machine dubbing startup, Deepdub, raised USD 20m in a series A round, Viva Translate closed a USD 4m seed round, and language API platform, NeuralSpace, raised USD 1.7m, also in a seed round.
In the month’s only M&A story, US-based video accessibility provider 3Play Media announced that it had acquired Captionmax, a provider of live and recorded captioning, localization, and audio description services.
February 2022 was a special month for financial results. Not only did several publicly traded language service providers (LSPs) provide full-year and interim updates, but more than 300 companies participated in the Slator 2022 Language Service Provider Index (LSPI), which launched on February 23, 2022.
The combined US-dollar revenue of Slator 2022 LSPI companies grew more than 22% in 2021 to nearly USD 9.5bn. This is an attractive headline rate that comprises M&A-driven consolidation, while organic growth across the ca. 300 LSPs is still estimated to be in the low double digits, a marked improvement from the previous year (see 2021 LSPI).
Among publicly-traded LSPs, Japan’s Honyaku Center released financial results for the nine months from April 1 to December 31, 2021, and reported that overall sales for the first three quarters increased 6.1% year-on-year to JPY 7.53bn (USD 65m).
US-based AMN Healthcare, the parent company of AMN Language Services (formerly Stratus Video), released Q4 results for the three months to December 31, 2021, as language interpretation revenue climbed 24% year-on-year to USD 47m.
Over in Australia, captioning, translation, and transcription provider, Ai-Media, recorded first-half revenues of AUD 29.6m (USD 21.1m), a 29% increase from the same period the previous year.
Meanwhile, UK-based Super Agency, RWS, released an AGM statement containing a company-compiled view of the latest analyst expectations for full-year 2022. RWS’ revenues are expected to hit GBP 761.2m, crossing the billion-dollar mark for the first time in 2022.
Over at LocJobs, 30 companies are hiring and there were more than 20 new job postings in the month of February. Companies such as Supertext, Locaria, Morningside Translations, and t’works posted their vacancies for roles spanning translation, sales, project management, and marketing.
The Slator LIJI relies on LinkedIn for part of its underlying data. The social media site has some 500 million users, many of whom share data about their skills, experience, location, company, and job titles on their personal LinkedIn pages. There are over 600,000 profiles under the Translation and Localization category and a search using the keyword Localization also yields more than 600,000 profiles.
In addition to using data from LinkedIn, the Slator LIJI also culls data from a range of sources, including global job aggregation sites and additional direct company data collected from Slator LSPI companies.
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