In Renato Beninatto’s insightful speech on the current landscape and future trends of language service industry, he illustrated how localizers can benefit from the advancement of technology and the opportunities generated from the shift of paradigm.
Renato started his speech with a remark on the language service industry: He stated that language service industry is essentially an industry that lives in fear of going out of business, especially after the rise of machine translation.
However, machine translation is not the end of human translation but the enabler of translation. Rather than denying the progress made in machine translation, we should adapt to the new reality and take advantage of the emergence of this new technology.
Renato went on to illustrate the opportunities that come with the evolution of technology in language service industry. There are more than 200 tech tools in language services industry, but they only constitute a small fraction of the industry. The overall value of the language service industry is approximately 49 billion dollars, but translation technology only makes up 775 million dollars, which is less than 2% of the total value of the whole industry. This implies that there is a great deal of potential in the development and integration of translation tools and technology.
Current translation technology landscape illustrated by Renato Beninatto
For example, a research conducted by Association of Translation Companies in the UK found out that there is a significant increase of LSPs receiving their work via connectors and APIs. It means that instead of receiving tasks through emails, more and more LSPs are receiving their tasks through clients’ content management systems. However, according to the data collected by Nimdzi, 150 content management systems are connected to translation in Translation Management System, APIs, or connectors, but more than 1500 content management systems do not have a standardized connector. This phenomenon indicates that there are plenty of room for improvement in the standardization of connectors between content management systems and translation management systems.
In addition, Renato also emphasized the importance of addressing new problems emerged from the development of technology. As technology advances, the problems we solve for our clients are constantly changing. For example, as more contents need to be translated into more languages in the era of globalization, the problem of translating long-tail languages can be addressed through zero-shot machine translation, which means machine translating content between unusual language pairs without an intermediate language. As a result, a content written in Latvian can be translated into Swahili directly. Such tasks were very unlikely to accomplish in the past due to the lack of translators in this language pair, but machine translation is capable of carrying out this task because of the advancement in neural machine translation.
Emerging problems and solutions in the language service industry
In our discussion of the dynamics between humans and machine translation, there is one thing that really speaks to my heart: machine translation will replace human translators, but it might take jobs away from the people who don’t know how to work with the machine. Therefore, as localizers living in an era in which the development of machine translation is making progress every day, it is of paramount importance that we be more tech-savvy at work, find our niche, and dive into the specific area in which our language pairs are indispensable and in demand. For example, TSMC from Taiwan has the most cutting-edge technology and the biggest market share in the semiconductor industry around the world. On top of that, translators with the language-pair of English and Traditional Chinese are fewer in number compared to translators who speak English and Simplified Chinese. Consequently, Taiwanese translators who specialize in semiconductor industry will have an edge over other translators in this specific domain. In summary, we cannot stop the evolution and implementation of technology in our line of work. However, as long as we possess the adaptive capacity to fit in to the fast-changing industry, machine translation will not be the end of our careers.