Britain’s translation industry has stopped growing. New analysis by international business database companydata.com shows that the number of active translation companies in the UK has fallen in 2026 for the first time since at least 2015. The country now counts 4,088 translation companies, down from a peak of 4,217 at the end of 2024.
Behind the turn is a reversal in the flow. In 2025, 601 translation companies were struck off the Companies House register against 546 newly incorporated, the first year in which closures outnumbered new arrivals. This year the gap is wider still: 361 companies registered between January and mid-September, while 436 closed.
For ten years the register did nothing but fill up, from 2,423 companies at the end of 2015 to 4,217 at the end of 2024, a run the pandemic barely interrupted. 2025 broke it. Of the companies on the register today, 1,922 do nothing but translate; the rest combine it with other work.
What happened to the work
Translators felt it before the register did. In a 2024 survey by the Chartered Institute of Linguists, more than 70 percent of freelance translators and interpreters said their workload had fallen. Half called the drop significant. In a Society of Authors survey the same year, 36 percent of translators said they had already lost work to generative AI and 77 percent expected it to cut their income.
What is left pays less. A UK freelance translator working through an agency gets around 7.5 pence a word for general text, and that rate is still sliding. This year’s European Language Industry Survey found every part of the industry agreeing that prices fell again in 2025, with no rebound expected. Increasingly the job is not translating at all but checking what a machine produced first, and that pays about a third less. Almost two thirds of independent translators now work with machine output in some form.
Not everyone is losing. RWS Holdings, Britain’s largest listed language services company, grew half-year revenue by around 5 percent to roughly 360 million pounds and lifted adjusted pre-tax profit from 18 million to 24 million pounds.
Not just a British problem
The UK is not an outlier. The number of translation companies here has fallen 1.8 percent since January. Across Europe the decline is steeper: 39,869 translation companies remain, down 2.5 percent this year.
Uttam Ramdaras, Data Analyst at companydata.com, said: “The gap has been narrowing for years and it has now closed. Until 2024, more translation companies opened than shut. Last year that flipped, and this year the gap is wider still. You cannot read motive from a register, but the timing is hard to ignore. Anyone can get a usable translation out of a free AI model in seconds, and the businesses that used to do that work are coming off the register.”
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