ALTA manages thousands of translation projects every year for businesses of all sizes, including many Fortune 500 companies. We get a pretty good snap-shot of which foreign languages are used most often for business in the U.S. by looking at the languages that are requested for translation projects in any given year.
Interestingly, our most requested languages for translation match up almost perfectly with this year’s list of most useful foreign languages to learn.
Technological advances, geopolitical events, and economic trends are often reflected in interesting ways by our clients’ requests, whether through a gradual increase in Brazilian Portuguese website translations, or a flood of requests for Arabic translation. Here is our list of the top 10 languages for translation services (to and from English) in 2008:
- Spanish Translation
- French Translation
- Portuguese Translation
- German Translation
- Canadian French
- Arabic Translation
- Simplified Chinese Translation
- Korean Translation
- Japanese Translation
- Italian Translation
We were looking over our most requested languages throughout this year just yesterday! Our list is almost identical to yours, with the exception of Russian (in place of Italian on your list). Our list is different from yours in the order of most requested. Thank you for sharing your list!
It would be very interesting to have an updated list for 2009. It would also be interesting, at least for me, to know at what level Greek appears on the list.
[...] widely in language combinations, scale, and complexity. As we noted in last year’s post, 10 Most Requested Languages for Translation in 2008, geopolitical events and economic trends are often reflected in interesting ways by our clients’ [...]