What languages are getting translated into English (in the US)?
May 25, 2019 3:52 PM Subscribe
Which languages have the largest overall markets in the US for translation into English?
I suppose I'm thinking across all sub-fields of translation. I guess if for the sake of better understanding I had to define my question in a way that is comically precise but unknowable: of paid translations into English in the US, which source language had the greatest total word count last year?
Well-grounded guesses based on experience and knowledge of the translation field are fine, but I wouldn't find it useful for someone to come in and fully speculate based on, like, the wikipedia page for most commonly spoken languages in the US. Thanks!
I suppose I'm thinking across all sub-fields of translation. I guess if for the sake of better understanding I had to define my question in a way that is comically precise but unknowable: of paid translations into English in the US, which source language had the greatest total word count last year?
Well-grounded guesses based on experience and knowledge of the translation field are fine, but I wouldn't find it useful for someone to come in and fully speculate based on, like, the wikipedia page for most commonly spoken languages in the US. Thanks!
Literary translation is an extremely small portion of the entire translation industry. I took a look at the job listings at Proz.com, which has far and away the biggest job board in the global translation industry. Job postings sometimes list a single specific pair (e.g., Chinese into English) but also often are looking to fill needs in both directions (e.g., a posting that looks for both Chinese into English and English into Chinese) or broad calls over multiple languages as agencies seek to add more freelancers to their pool. For the purposes of my quick survey, I only counted job ads for single language pairs, but I did include both into and out of English. Over the past 10 days, the language pair with the most number of job posts was Chinese <> English, followed by Spanish, French, Russian, Portuguese, and German. The numbers for Japanese<>English, Korean<>English, and Hindi<>English were much smaller than the above.
Obviously, this is only the roughest of ballpark ways to approach volume in the translation industries. It's an extremely small sample. One major caveat is that it looks only at the freelance sector and won't capture in-house translators. It also won't reflect jobs that get assigned through other sites, and doesn't reflect the volume of work getting distributed through existing client/freelance relationships.
That said, of the top 5 languages in this extremely informal survey, I would suspect that Chinese and Spanish are the two most likely to be underrepresented due to the existence of alternative, more local channels/language-specific channels for job allocation. My gut feeling is that Spanish probably actually edges out Chinese because U.S. trade with Spanish-speaking countries is nearly equal to that with China, and on top of that you add the very large volume of translation that is being done at a fairly local level, sometimes by bilingual persons who are not full-time professional translators--personal documentation, government documentation from Federal on down to local school districts and schools, health care system forms and information, and so on.
posted by drlith at 7:01 PM on May 25, 2019
Obviously, this is only the roughest of ballpark ways to approach volume in the translation industries. It's an extremely small sample. One major caveat is that it looks only at the freelance sector and won't capture in-house translators. It also won't reflect jobs that get assigned through other sites, and doesn't reflect the volume of work getting distributed through existing client/freelance relationships.
That said, of the top 5 languages in this extremely informal survey, I would suspect that Chinese and Spanish are the two most likely to be underrepresented due to the existence of alternative, more local channels/language-specific channels for job allocation. My gut feeling is that Spanish probably actually edges out Chinese because U.S. trade with Spanish-speaking countries is nearly equal to that with China, and on top of that you add the very large volume of translation that is being done at a fairly local level, sometimes by bilingual persons who are not full-time professional translators--personal documentation, government documentation from Federal on down to local school districts and schools, health care system forms and information, and so on.
posted by drlith at 7:01 PM on May 25, 2019
Consider also that machine translation is eating into the low end for languages that translate well automatically. I imagine there are lots of Spanish-English translation jobs that someone would have been paid to do ten years ago that are now done by software.
posted by potrzebie at 7:53 PM on May 25, 2019
posted by potrzebie at 7:53 PM on May 25, 2019
A statistical issue is that a language name, e.g. Chinese, may be multiple languages for the purpose of translation so the order changes based on which are combined and which are listed separately.
posted by SemiSalt at 5:31 AM on May 27, 2019
posted by SemiSalt at 5:31 AM on May 27, 2019
This thread is closed to new comments.
130 French
121 Spanish
70 German
51 Japanese
43 Italian
28 Swedish
27 Norwegian
25 Chinese
24 Russian
21 Arabic
20 Portuguese
19 Dutch
14 Danish
13 Polish
13 Hebrew
11 Korean
10 Icelandic
posted by Wobbuffet at 4:18 PM on May 25, 2019 [3 favorites]