By reorganizing its patchwork of translation services, the Milwaukee-based ManpowerGroup Inc. created a new, $105 million-a-year business.

There’s a joke among linguists: If you speak two languages, you’re bilingual. If you speak one, you’re American.

The joke isn’t funny when officials warn that America’s “national language gap” is a major competitiveness handicap because the winners of global trade are those who can penetrate foreign markets.

The nation’s predicament triggered a new form of innovation at ManpowerGroup Inc., spawning an entirely new division that has nothing to do with Manpower’s mainstay business of temp workers. The Milwaukee-based multinational, which has offered language translations for years as a non-strategic sideline service, just launched a stand-alone translation subsidiary — and it’s big business.

Specializing in over 150 languages, the new division encompasses the raft of cultural sensitivities and bridge-building that go with translations, including brand localization services and content management that are useful to avoid unintended marketing embarrassments created by literal word-for-word translations.

“Here in America, we are so English-centric that we think everything needs to occur in English,” said Norman Newton, who launched the new business unit, ManpowerGroup Solutions Language Services. “In the rest of the world, that’s not the case. It’s a multilinguistic world.”

Merely by reorganizing its patchwork of translation and localization services, Manpower created a new, $105 million-a-year business that automatically joins the world’s top 10 translation services, Newton said.

“The United States is a long way from being the multilingual society that so many of our economic competitors are,” warned U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan in speeches.

The share of American public elementary schools that offer foreign language instruction fell to 15 percent in 2010 from 24 percent 10 years earlier, said Nancy Rhodes, who analyzes poll results for the Center for Applied Linguistics, a nonprofit research group in Washington, D.C.