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: