This globalized era offers a variety of opportunities for businesses that know how to connect with customers. The key for this connection is, first of all, speaking the clients’ language. This, along with the need for exchange of information, has led to an increasing demand of linguistic services for any kind of sector.

Truth is, translation plays a big part in different areas including business, history, human life and more. If we think about it, translation is present everywhere from buying a foreign product whose label includes two more languages apart from the original, to buying a book from a French author who wrote it in its native language and later translated to English, to accessing websites. Indeed, the ultimate purpose of linguistic services is to enable cross-cultural communication, both oral and written so it is present in any form.

However, although it is one of the most ancient and most expanded industries, there are different facts that most people don’t know. Are you interested in knowing some more abut the linguistic industry, we have some facts about the industry for you!

1. There is a big variety of services involved in the linguistic world.

The scope in this industry includes a wide range of services including:

• Translation
• Language interpretation
• Language education
• Language localization
• Software localization
• Machine translation
• Editing
• Computer-assisted translation tools development

2. It is a big industry.

The report “The Language Services Market: 2018” by Common Sense Advisory estimates that the global market for outsourced language services will reach 56.18 billion USD by 2021.

3. The five most common target languages are German, French, Spanish, English and Japanese.

4. The most expensive translation mistake represented a cost of 10 million USD.

In 2009, the bank HSBC launched a marketing campaign with the slogan “Assume Nothing”. This same campaign was localized for different foreign markets. However, there a bad choice on words led to a translated slogan saying “Do Nothing” in different languages. This mistake caused a scramble. They later developed an emergency rebranding to save their reputation, the cost was 10 million USD.

5. There are over 6900 living languages.Even though the exact number is still a debatable topic for linguistic experts, the Ethnologue catalog of world language estimates that there are 6909 living languages in the world, which represents 94% of the world population.