EU Commission launches an online tool for mapping the language industry
On 18 November 2010, in Brussels, the Directorate-General for Translation of the European Commission launched an interactive online tool for collecting and exchanging data on the European Union's language profession and industry. Companies, associations, individual practitioners and national statistics bodies were invited to contribute. The stated aim was to turn the platform into a valuable source of facts and figures about a sector that, for all its size, had never managed to count itself properly.
That is the part worth sitting with. An industry employing hundreds of thousands of people across the continent did not have reliable numbers on how many people it employed.
What the platform does
The tool was built to do three things: allow document search, allow the addition of information, and collect structured data through an online questionnaire. Straightforward enough. The interesting decision was in the scope, because the Commission drew the boundary of the language industry far wider than most people would.
The platform covers eight subsectors:
- translation
- interpreting
- subtitling and dubbing
- software localisation and website globalisation
- language technology tools development
- multilingual conference organisation
- language teaching
- linguistic consultancy
Putting language teaching and conference organisation in the same frame as machine translation R and D is a claim, not an accident. It says these activities share a supply chain, compete for the same graduates, and rise and fall with the same underlying demand for cross-border communication.
Why the numbers were missing
The language sector is structurally hostile to measurement. It is dominated by micro-enterprises and sole traders. A large share of its output is produced by freelancers who invoice agencies who invoice clients, and the same piece of work can be counted once, twice, or not at all depending on where you stand in that chain. Standard industrial classification codes were not designed with this sector in mind, so a translation company can end up filed under business services alongside a firm that cleans offices.
The result is that basic questions had no reliable answers. How large is the market? How fast is it growing? What proportion of revenue comes from public bodies against private clients? How many people make a full living from it? Anyone who has tried to build a business plan in this field has run into the same wall.
Why the Commission cared
The Directorate-General for Translation is one of the largest translation services on earth. The EU operates in 24 official languages, and every regulation, directive and judgment must exist in all of them with equal legal force. That is not a courtesy to smaller member states. It is a condition of the legal order, because a citizen cannot be bound by a law published only in a language they do not read.
An institution with that obligation has a direct interest in the health of the private market it recruits from and contracts to. If the pipeline of qualified specialists thins, the Commission feels it first. Measuring the sector was, in that sense, an act of self-interest as much as of policy.
What the data eventually showed
Subsequent studies commissioned off the back of this work sketched a sector considerably larger than the popular image of it, growing steadily, and consolidating at the top while remaining fragmented at the bottom. A handful of large vendors handle enterprise accounts. Beneath them sits a very long tail of small agencies and individual practitioners.
The localization industry in particular turned out to be the growth engine, outpacing traditional document translation, because software and digital products need continuous adaptation rather than one-off rendering. A translated contract is finished. A localised app is never finished, because there is a release next month.
Data as a political instrument
Sectors that cannot quantify themselves do not get taken seriously in a budget negotiation. Steel, agriculture and pharmaceuticals arrive at the table with numbers. The language industry, for most of its history, arrived with anecdotes and a strong sense of its own importance.
That distinction determines everything downstream: research funding, whether training programmes get supported, whether procurement rules recognise professional qualification, and whether machine translation policy is written with practitioners in the room or without them. The platform was, in effect, an attempt to give the sector the one thing it needed to be argued about seriously.
What a mapped industry can bargain for
Once a sector has numbers, it can make claims that survive contact with a finance ministry. It can show that a given volume of public procurement supports a given number of jobs. It can demonstrate that the pipeline of qualified specialists in a rare language pair is thinning before the shortage becomes a crisis. It can argue for training funding on the basis of projected demand rather than professional sentiment.
It also allows the sector to see its own weaknesses. Fragmentation at the freelance end means poor bargaining power and downward pressure on rates. A data platform that shows how much value flows through intermediaries is uncomfortable reading for intermediaries, which may be one reason participation from the largest players was never universal.
The unresolved problem
A voluntary questionnaire produces the data of people willing to fill in a voluntary questionnaire. Organised agencies and national associations respond. The freelancer working alone, who may be the most representative unit in the entire industry, mostly does not, because filling in a Commission survey is unpaid work and there is a deadline on Thursday.
The same complaint recurs among practitioners on r/TranslationStudies: the people who are measured are the people who have staff to do the measuring. That does not make the exercise worthless. It means the picture skews toward the organised end of a sector whose defining feature is that most of it is not organised at all. Knowing that the map is incomplete is still better than having no map, which was the position the industry occupied for the previous fifty years.