86% think a centralized team should manage multilingual efforts

86% of businesses surveyed believe a single, centralized team owning and managing all the multilingual efforts in an organization could be extremely or very valuable, Unbabel, the industry’s first AI-powered Language Operations platform, said after an in-depth survey examining language and multilingual strategy across departments in global enterprises.

The study found an overwhelming demand for a more unified and cost-effective solution to localization at a time when scaling in new markets and languages is a necessity for businesses. 62% of global decision-makers agree that translation efforts have gone up in the last year, and 59% of decision-makers say their organizations are planning to increase their translation and/or localization budget next year.

While expanding into new languages was and will remain a top priority for organizations, existing language strategies not enabling companies to scale effectively. Respondents feel their current localization function falls short in quality (34%), speed (32%), and consistency (30%). Businesses expanding to capture new markets are blocked by language, due to the tremendous cost (say 44%), a lack of a clear single owner (36%) and the disconnected, decentralized process of incorporating new languages (36%).

An overwhelming majority (more than 90%) of those surveyed agree a centralized LangOps platform could be a cost-effective solution to do more with less, and more than 86% believe that a centralized LangOps team managing all the translation and localization efforts in their organization could be extremely or very valuable. LangOps would support several key business goals, including expansion to new markets (49%), increase in demand in non-English-speaking countries (44%), increase in customer retention and/or customer satisfaction (33%), and new revenue generation (32%).

The survey was conducted from April 15 to May 6, 2021. Unbabel collected findings from 1,058 U.S. respondents with decision-making authority across functions such as customer support, sales, marketing, IT, business operations, HR, finance, and procurement in organizations with global operations. Participants were split evenly between those of mid-market (100-999 employees) and enterprise (1,000+ employee) organizations.

Read the full report by Unbabel.