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In January, the World Bank observed that, "for the first time since the global financial crisis, all major regions of the world are experiencing an uptick in economic growth." CSA Research's 14th annual study of the language services and technology market demonstrated that the language sector has benefited from that good fortune. It grew at 7.99% over the past year to reach a projected US$46.52 billion in revenue for 2018. Read about our survey and research process here. As they have for the past few years, successful language service providers have focused on becoming more efficient, creating innovative processes and services, and embraced new technologies such as artificial intelligence and neural machine translation to streamline operations. Besides these functional improvements, the industry itself has continued consolidating through horizontal mergers that combine companies competing in the same space and vertical mergers between companies operating at different points in the supply chain. Meanwhile, demand has continued growing for language services, both on traditional platforms and for mobile, spoken, Internet of Things (IoT), and over-the-top (OTT) content. As enterprises around the world continue their digital transformation, many have begun to realize the growing value of their content once it leaves the siloes for which it was originally created and can be adapted for use in many more situations and locales. How have these dynamics affected the market for outsourced language services and technology? CSA Research just produced comprehensive primary research of the sector, this year published as "The Language Services Market: 2018," "Who's Who in Language Services and Technology: 2018 Rankings," and "The Language Services Market: Research Methodology 2018." We complemented the rankings with a spreadsheet of the ranked companies, "2018 Data on 195 Top LSPs" with 2016 and 2017 revenue data in local and U.S.currencies, by number of full-time employees, by status, regions, country, and number of offices. Upcoming reports will update our Data Visualizations series and data highlights with 2018 survey data. What else did we find in our 2018 research?
The Language Services Market and Who's Who Ranking reports complement these datapoints with analysis and insight on the market, 38 tables and 22 figures providing details on projected growth rates, global and regional breakdowns, the shape and size of the language services supply chain, the size of the market for individual language services and software, the impact of foreign exchange rates, and, of course, the rankings. In our analysis of this dataset and primary research from our other research projects, we identified continuing efforts by the most ambitious LSPs to differentiate their offerings. They are branching out beyond language services to address the global content, marketing, and operational functions of enterprises. The "what's next?" chapter of this research lays out the challenge for language service providers to re-think their brand and value propositions. We contend that the providers who thrive will be the ones that can adapt to the volumes, timetables, budgets, expectations of quality and appropriateness, and – most importantly – client business needs that extend beyond plain old language services like translation and interpreting to meet the challenging business requirements of their customers' global digital transformations (GDX). In this research, CSA Research reiterates the challenges we laid down in last year's research to help enterprises manage the complexity of content use and adaptation across its life cycle, from source to all its target permutations. The report describing the emerging role of ambitious LSPs as helpmates for digital transformation and as global content service providers is available as part of a research membership.
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