The translation industry, one verified number at a time
This page collects figures the industry has already made public, one paragraph per finding, each with a link to its source.
This quarter at a glance (2025 figures)
- ¥70.12 bn
- Total output of China’s translation industry
- Translators Association of China, 2026 industry development report
- 6.867M
- People working in translation (1.135M full-time)
- Same source
- 66%+
- Share of projects delivered by machine translation, or MT plus post-editing
- Same source
- 2,183
- Companies whose main business is AI translation, up 638 in a year
- Same source
Latest updates
9 posts-
2026-10-28
Mandarin in the Hispanic workplace: how China trade drives bilingual hiring
From the port of Barcelona to Mexican industry, Spanish-speaking companies are hunting for Chinese-Spanish bilingual talent. We review the real demand with verifiable data.
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2026-10-28
Why Chinese Language Skills Are Opening Career Doors in the English-Speaking World
Across the UK, the US, Singapore and India, employers are paying a premium for p…
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2026-10-28
Chinese in the German-speaking world: why demand keeps expanding
Over 300 schools in Germany now teach Chinese, more than 30,000 pupils study it, and China is once again Germany's largest trading partner…
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2026-10-28
Chinese in the Arab world: the 'hard skill' employers now ask for
In the Arab region Chinese is no longer just an elective — it is a skill employers name explicitly, as Chinese firms expand in energy, infrastructure and e-commerce across the Gulf and North Africa…
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2026-10-28
Post-editing is now the norm: who gets paid what after AI
Machine draft, human polish — now standard practice. It has rewritten unit prices: post-editing runs $0.05–0.15 per word versus $0.15–0.30 for standard human translation…
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2026-10-28
China's language mix: English takes 80%, smaller languages are rising
English absorbs over 80% of the business while demand for Russian, Korean and Vietnamese suddenly climbs. Both are true: they come from two different groups of buyers…
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2026-10-28
Localization orders from China's 'new three' cultural exports
Games, micro-dramas and web novels are dubbed the 'new three' of cultural exports. All three share one trait: huge volume, fast updates — beyond what traditional human delivery can match…
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2026-10-28
Two studies: why translators rank first in AI exposure
One from Microsoft Research, one from the Oxford Martin School — measuring different things…
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2026-10-28
Translation industry 2025–2026: demand, languages and AI
The global pie keeps growing while China's output slips one point; English still takes 80%+ of Chinese business, but the real shortages are Russian, Korean and Vietnamese; and in AI, translators rank first in exposure…
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