The Slator Language Industry Job Index (LIJI) was developed for the purpose of tracking how employment and hiring activity trend in the global language industry.
In December 2019, the Slator LIJI rose to 108.95 up from 106.79 in November 2019. The baseline was taken to be July 2018 (100), the starting point from which expansion or contraction of employment and hiring activity across the industry was measured.
After a slow start to the year in January 2019 and February 2019, the index rose in May 2019 before dipping slightly in June 2019. It has now grown for the sixth consecutive month since July 2019.Â
The upward trend in December was reflected in most of the indicators used for the LIJI, including the number of job postings from Slator LSPI companies and the number of people returned using a keyword search for Localization on LinkedIn. However, there was a slight decrease in the number of job postings on one of the job aggregation sites monitored by Slator, which slowed the overall increase.
Observational data relating to activity across the language industry in the month of November 2019 showed good indicators of a buoyant industry, with M&A and hiring activity continuing strongly.
On the M&A front, TransPerfect acquired two media localization and post-production companies: Germany-based Scheune München Mediaproduction and Argentina-based Chulengo. In addition, Summa Linguae signed a deal to acquire Canada-based Globalme, a localization and data annotation company, while language technology provider AppTek acquired US-based Ignite-Tek, a speech transcription and technology company.
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In a Slator demand driver story in November 2019, the EU Medical Device Regulation deadline edged closer, requiring that medical device content be translated into all 24 official EU languages.
In hiring news, Thierry Fontenelle left the European Union’s Translation Centre (CdT) to become Head of the Linguistic Services Division at the European Investment Bank (EIB), and Tony Stoupas stepped into the role of Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Lionbridge. Slator also reported on key industry hires at several language service and technology providers (LSPs), including EasyTranslate, lingoking, Lilt, Vistatec, and Summa Linguae. We also tracked 14 buyer moves in the November Language Industry Buyer Tracker (PRO).
However, it was not good news all round in November, as US-based LSP Carmazzi Global Solutions filed for bankruptcy due to ongoing litigation with the Social Security Administration (SSA). Meanwhile, TVT Media, a London-headquartered provider of media localization and end-to-end content services, filed for insolvency after the acquisition of Amsterdam-based Digital Media Centre (DMC) brought it to its knees.
Slator 2019 Travel & Retail Localization Report
The Slator LIJI relies on LinkedIn for a substantial part of the underlying data. The social media 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. 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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