Slator Language Industry Jobs Index (LIJI) Dips Slightly in November 2018

The Slator Language Industry Job Index (LIJI) was developed for the purpose of tracking how employment and hiring activity is trending across the global language industry.

In its fourth month, November 2018, the Slator Language Job Index (LIJI) fell slightly to 100.85, down 1.84 points from the month of October. The baseline is taken to be July 2018 (100) and is used as a starting point from which to measure expansion or contraction of employment and hiring activity across the industry. The index increased slightly from July to August 2018, fell marginally in September 2018, and then increased by two points in October 2018.

The downward trend in November was reflected across almost all of the indicators used for the LIJI, including the number of profiles on LinkedIn registered under the Translation and Localization category and the number of profiles returned using the keyword search. However, there was a slight increase in the number of job postings listed on some of the job aggregation sites that Slator monitors, and among Slator LSPI companies, which mitigated the overall decrease for the month of November.

Observational data relating to activity across the language industry in October 2018 shows a rapid pace of M&A with five deals completed during the month including the Technicis acquisition of AAC Global, BTI Studios Acquisition of Creative Studios and LanguageWire acquisition of Xplanation. Outsider interest in language industry startups also seems to have renewed in October 2018, as Interprefy secured CHF 0.5m funding in a bridge round, and Lilt and Qordoba both received venture capitalist funding, to the tune of USD 9.5m and USD 11.5m respectively.

There was also growth observed in pockets of Europe. UK-based language service provider RWS forecasted revenues of “no less than GBP 305m” (USD 400m) for 2018, as recently acquired Moravia’s full-year earnings boost the Group’s top line. In Italy, meanwhile, cognitive computing and text analytics company Expert System posted 52% revenue growth for the six months to June 2018.

Slator LIJI relies on LinkedIn for a substantial part of the underlying data. The 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. The site has over 600,000 profiles under its Translation and Localization category and a search for the keyword Localization also yields over 600,000 profiles.

In addition to using data from LinkedIn, the Slator LIJI is based on data from a range of sources including global job aggregation sites, and additional direct company data collected from Slator LSPI companies.