I normally leave all of my work posts for the Apogee website, but I had to copy this one here. I’m building up a series of statistics for presentation at the Game Designers’ Conference next week. One of the areas of natural interest is which languages are most important? The rule-of-thumb is that the main Western European languages are the biggest, with all of the others falling in line somewhere below them.
I knew that this wasn’t true of our most recent work, and decided to crunch the data. I pulled together information from two years of invoices yesterday afternoon. Below are the top 12 languages by wordcount and the percent of their total contribution to our company’s output over the last two years. Not included are the 33 other languages which each had less than a 2% contribution to our work.
Chinese is firmly at the top, with some 26% of our business. Some of this is explained by our clients translating their backlists (Russian also appreciated from this effect). However, it’s also true that we are only one of several translation agencies working for some clients, and those clients have shifted their Chinese work to us. Whether it’s because we were better, faster or the others just didn’t offer those languages, I don’t know.
Anyway, here are the numbers. Don’t assume they’re the same for everyone in the business — I’m sure they’re not.
| Simplified Chinese | 15.88% |
| Traditional Chinese | 10.17% |
| Spanish | 9.96% |
| Russian | 9.38% |
| Italian | 9.31% |
| German | 8.40% |
| Japanese | 8.28% |
| French | 7.70% |
| Norwegian | 3.60% |
| Latin American Spanish | 2.99% |
| Thai | 2.41% |
| Brazilian Portuguese | 2.10% |