Hiring activity in the global language market saw an uptick in July 2022, following a slight decline in June. The Slator Language Industry Job Index (LIJI) resumed a moderate upward trend in 2022, notwithstanding June’s result and 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 approximately 1.5 points to 180.11 in July 2022, up from 178.55 the month prior and roughly level with May 2022. The job index has climbed more than seven points since January 2022.
The uptick in the July 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 June 2022 indicate that the translation, localization, and interpreting hiring environment remains steady in the second quarter of 2022.
Funding, Hiring, Layoffs
June was an active month for funding rounds covered by Slator, as Memsource secured USD 16m in growth capital and AI dubbing startup Papercup raised USD 20m in a series A round. Meanwhile, Sanas, an accent technology startup, raised USD 32m in a series A, and translation earpiece startup Waverly Labs launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise capital.
In M&A, Argo Translation acquired e-learning specialist ICD; and Germany-based language service provider Transline acquired Micado Innovation.
Parts of the industry saw layoffs in June, with redundancies reported at RSI provider KUDO, while elsewhere — such as in big tech — hiring activity was noted for senior localization positions.
Over at LocJobs, more than 20 companies were hiring and there were close to 20 new job postings in the month of June. Companies such as Acclaro, Ad Astra, Anzu, Lengoo, Morningside, memoQ, Supertext, t'works, and TALK posted their vacancies for roles spanning, translation, interpreting, sales, project management, and engineering.
Among publicly-traded LSPs, RWS reported mixed results with revenues at USD 466m for the six months ended March 31, 2022. New York-listed global digital healthcare company, Uphealth, reported total revenue of USD 36m for Q1, 2022, while games localizer Keywords Studios hosted a Capital Markets Day.
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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