What the 2025 Nimdzi 100 reveals about our changing stage
Revision: Patricia Worsley, Todd Harkin
Cacá Diegues’s 1979 road movie “Bye Bye Brazil” follows a ragtag circus troupe winding its way through the country, only to discover that television is pulling away its crowds. The accordion still moves hearts, the strongman still hoists weights—but audiences now gather around glowing screens.
That same storyline echoed in Montréal, where the CEO of Cirque du Soleil opened the GALA Conference with a lesson in reinvention. He recounted how the company reimagined the traditional circus. As we know, the circus yielded to television, which is now being amplified by streaming. His remarks transported me back to Diegues’s film—while also reminding me that modern audiences still fill stadiums to see Beyoncé or flock to hear Os Titãs on their reunion tour. Entertainment doesn’t disappear. It migrates to a new stage.
It was with this backdrop of continual reinvention that I introduced the latest Nimdzi 100, which is available for free download for anyone seeking an in-depth look at where our industry is headed. The ranking reinforces that language services are not in decline—they are simply moving to new venues, just like the circus once did. The tent may collapse, but the appetite for spectacle—and for expertly crafted content—remains strong.
According to Nimdzi, the ten largest language service providers now bring in more than $7 billion collectively—twice as much as they did in 2019. Much of that growth stems from acquisitions and steep investments in automation. Mid-sized firms have plateaued, while cloud-native newcomers woo clients with large language models, synthetic data, and accelerated post-editing workflows. Content volumes have ballooned beyond what any human workforce could possibly absorb.
To understand what that tidal shift looks like from a translator’s desk, let’s begin with the following graph: Language work as perceived by individuals.
In the first graph, the yellow bar at the top represents the early 2000s—a time when every line of text was crafted by a human hand. In the bars that follow, a widening blue section begins to take shape, initially for machine translation, and later for large language models. At first glance, the story appears straightforward: technology steadily consumes the human share. It’s a narrative that continues to stoke unease in conference corridors.
But the next graph offers a more nuanced perspective.
Language work across the industry widens the lens. Each decade brings a broader blue tide, representing an exponential surge in content volume. In the 2010s, machine translation absorbed low-stakes material. In the 2020s, MT combined with large language models is swallowing up the medium-stakes tier. And by the 2030s, language AI pipelines are projected to churn through even more raw text.
Yet, one constant remains: the yellow band clinging to the right edge of every bar. Human expertise hasn’t disappeared—it has migrated. It now occupies the high-value zone, where legal liability, brand equity, and cultural nuance converge. What remains in human hands carries more weight and demands a broader skill set. The role of the language professional has shifted from typing sentences to designing prompts, curating datasets, and signing off on messages that can sway public opinion or carry legal consequence.
That contrast between the two visuals is essential. The first evokes the fear; the second, the reality. Automation is absorbing content that likely never would have made it to a human in the first place—millions of product SKUs, endless customer support logs, hours of internal meeting subtitles. Meanwhile, the human role is narrowing and intensifying—focused squarely on the critical zones machines cannot safely or credibly enter.
The traveling show in “Bye Bye Brazil” survived by adapting—taking its act to television, or reimagining it for packed urban theaters. Translators today face a similar crossroads. Those who carve out specialist niches in fields like medical, conference interpreting, or cultural production become increasingly difficult to replace. Others branch out horizontally—embracing subtitling, prompt engineering, terminology mining, or multilingual data curation. A growing segment is coming together in virtual studios, offering integrated content solutions rather than isolated deliverables. And everyone—from rookies to veterans—benefits from learning how to sell their value and tell their own story. Clients don’t fall from the sky; compelling value propositions win them over.
Technology isn’t wiping us out—it’s stretching the stage far beyond what the old tent could ever contain. The circus may be gone, but the show is bigger than ever.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR – Renato Beninatto
Renato Beninatto is a consultant, co-founder of Nimdzi Insights, and author of The General Theory of the Translation Company. He speaks five languages, has lived in seven countries, and still believes picanha tastes better in Rio.
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