GOALS
You have a translation company and you are interested in understanding the global translation and book publishing markets to better inform your business decisions. You are specifically interested in knowing the global market size for the translation services market, the average number of books that are translated across the world each year and the four largest book publishers in the world.
EARLY FINDINGS
- The Translation Services industry in the US earned a total annual revenue of $6 billion in 2019, with an annual growth of 4.0% over the past five years.
- A Market Research Future report estimated that the global market for translation services will grow to $57 billion by 2022, at a CAGR of 11%. Therefore, the global market size of the translation services market in 2019 can be calculated to be $41.68 billion ($57 billion/1.11*1.11*1.11).
- UNESCO's Index Translatorium is a central database of all translated books worldwide. The database covers more than 462,300 authors and 1,100 languages.
- Each year, UNESCO's database is updated with about 100,000 new entries, which means roughly 100,000 books are translated worldwide each year.
- Publishers Weekly ranks the world's largest book publishers according to revenue. It publishes a new list every year, for the preceding year.
- The top 5 of the world's largest book publishers are Pearson, RELX Group, ThompsonReuters, Bertelsmann and Wolters Kluwer.
PROPOSED NEXT STEPS
We suggest continuing this reasarch by:
1) Doing a deeper dive on the top 4 publishers and trying to find the translation services they use. For each publisher, we will attempt to find the company they use for translation services and we can also include some aditional information like the revenue and the websites of the publishers. (6 hours, $174)
2) Exploring the Index Translatorium and counting all entries made in the previous 3-5 years. This would show whether the number of translated books each year is increasing or decreasing, which can hint at demand for translation services. (3 hours, $87)