Chinese Translations are First
I’ve been working on some statistics for the upcoming GDC conference. One of the stats is the popularity of languages in translation. Since no one keeps such statistics, I thought I’d actually generate the ones from my company. This is not automatically done, so it meant about an hour of crunching numbers into an Excel spreadsheet from our accounting program. The numbers below are the top 12 (of 45 languages) from the last two years of work Apogee has done.
There are a few surprises here. Chinese is a full 26% of our workload, by wordcount. One reason for that, as well as Russian’s place in the statistics, is that a couple of clients decided to translate their backlists into these languages. Another reason is that, for several of our clients, we are one of many translation houses working for them. Either our Chinese work was faster, better or they didn’t offer the language at all, as we were receiving quite a few more requests from them for Chinese than any other language.
It may well be that other houses are seeing more work from the standard French, Italian, German and Spanish combination, but here we’re working quite a bit on the expansion languages.
| 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% |