Hiring activity in the global language market inched upward in October 2022. The Slator Language Industry Job Index (LIJI) experienced a dip the previous month off the back of record levels in August 2022.
Despite macroeconomic uncertainty, global inflation pressures, and the impending energy crisis in Europe, language industry employment remained surprisingly resilient.
The Slator LIJI climbed 2.07 points to 180.54 in October 2022, up from 178.47 the month prior. The job index had climbed just under eight points in 2022, year to date, and 80 points since the LIJI was launched three years ago in July 2018.
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 uptick in the October 2022 index 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 over the past month indicate that the translation, localization, and interpreting hiring environment has, thus far, remained surprisingly resilient in the second half of 2022.
M&A, Funding, Financials
September 2022 was a quiet month for M&A transactions covered by Slator. Lionbridge, however, did announce its plan to acquire Game Tester, a game-testing platform based in Australia and South Africa.
Slator covered news of three funding or investment rounds in September. Live meeting transcription startup, Airgram, raised USD 10m in a series A from four investors. Over in Switzerland, SaaS translation platform, Neur.on, announced an investment round of USD 1.6m. In India, machine dubbing startup, Dubdub, raised USD 1m in seed funding.
Also in September 2022, shares in publicly-listed media localization provider, Zoo Digital, rallied as first-half 2023 performance beat expectations with revenues increasing 89% year over year. Ireland’s Keywords Studios reported strong top-line growth and an increase in profitability as its Globalize services line grew 32% in H1 FY22.
Over at LocJobs, seven companies are now hiring. There were also 10 new job postings in September 2022. Companies such as Blackbird.io, Language Insight, Supertext, and Global Wordsmiths posted their vacancies for roles spanning vendor management, project management, and engineering.
The Slator LIJI relies on LinkedIn for part of its underlying data. The social media site has more than 800 million users, many of whom share data about their skills, experience, location, company, and job titles on their personal LinkedIn pages. There are over 760,000 profiles under the Translation and Localization category and a search using the keyword Localization also yields more than 840,000 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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