2017 – What happened in the Translation Industry – trends and news?

Translation industry trends are constantly changing as technology gives new opportunities. We observe with curiosity the industry trends so our partners and clients adapt to innovative business ideas that can create new streams of revenue for them. 2017 has been productive, chaotic, involving ideas and methods for our industry. Why? Because the language industry despite its challenges really did grow. The growth it experienced is expected to create a wave into 2018, according to all news and trends published in Slator, Multilingual and Common Sense Advisory.

Go Global

In the past half-century, translation has started its own development, and only a handful of companies have been able to offer it at first, thus standing out among the competitors. What happened nowadays, with the constant development of technologies and numerous ways of communicating with almost anybody across the World, we become more and more interconnected. Today people are familiar with a variety of languages, cultural beliefs, habits, and lifestyles of nations all over the globe. This close connection stimulates the integration of markets, commerce, and communication and brings us closer together.

Machine translation (MT) is changing – are you ready?

People are talking that MT will be able to compete with human translation in 2018, however, we consider it highly unlikely that it will win the battle when it comes to quality. Nevertheless, a point that we can add to the MT is that machines in modern times are faster than humans will.  We can also agree that human evaluations of MT are extensive and can be very expensive. However, humans help machines to work better, isn’t it a provocative idea that machines can be better than humans?

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The peak of MT in 2018 will be the mixture of traditional MT with different technologies – coming up in hybrid, semi-hybrid, and intelligent generation – including, but not limited to:

Neural Machine Translation (NMT)

Almost 2 years after its appearance in the translation industry, NMT is the most commented topic in the MT world. According to Slator.com, the leading IT companies like Microsoft, Google, Facebook, have all transitioned to NMT, and so did the European Patent Office and the World Intellectual Property Organization. Even end-buyers are starting to build their own systems based on open-source models.

Adaptive Machine Translation (AMT)

Learns and improves in real-time as users post-edit, delivering MT output unique to your style, content, and terminology. According to SDL, Adaptive MT, translates faster with smarter MT suggestions, it is easy to use and get started with. It is absolutely secure, no data is collected or shared. Other advantages mentioned are:

  • Unique MT output, personal to you.
  • Access directly within Studio 2017
  • No translation memory needed to train the MT
  • Automatic, real-time learning – no pre-training required

As a result of the reduced costs of Machine Translation, the language industry will face more and more variations and practice of MT in 2018.

App Translation

trends and newsTranslation of applications has been one of the fastest-growing aspects of the translation business for the last 3 years. Now we can bravely say that in 2017 we have a peak and just you imagine what will happen in 2018?

In order to increase their popularity and expand their influence on the international market, application developers are making apps available in as many different languages as possible.

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Last month we shared with you an article about the best applications in the translation industry for 2017, let’s use it as an example, how applications thanks to the translation can break communication borders.

Video Translation

Video content marketing is hitting its own peak of interest. Nowadays Youtube is receiving three hundred hours of video each minute.

Almost five billion videos are viewed every day by one and a half billion users. 70% of the people using Youtube are not located in the United States, the majority of people are not even Anglophones. These numbers only show us the increasing demand for video translation and localization – the leading trend for the current year and apparently in high demand for 2018.  This trend changes the meaning of video marketing and content marketing, which is linked to content translation. Out of our own experience currently in our company marketing content is getting more and more popular.

International companies can increase the power of their videos by customizing the content and language of the video to reach the desired target audience.

If the visualization of your video is well-produced, the next step is to decide how to translate the audio. Options could be, to have a different audio track – a voiceover or dubbing – or to use subtitles.

Voice-over and Dubbing vs. Subtitling

Voice-over is adding a voice audio track, which is not a component of the narrative. If your original video already has a voice-over, it would be a piece of cake to change one language track for another. What you will need is the translated transcript, and a voice actor to record the track in the new language.

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Regarding dubbing services, we’d say that this is a preferred method in certain countries. People love to listen to a movie or video in their native language. What we have heard from our parents and elderly people is that the subtitles are changing too fast and the pleasure of watching the movie is lost. On the other hand this is not the case with the young adults. They prefer original movies/videos, with subtitles and this is another method for them to learn the language.

That is the reason in most of the countries for the cinemas to show movies without dubbing or to even have separate cinemas for dubbed movies.

Captioning

The primary idea of captions was to help people with damaged hearing, however nowadays, social media has made captioning convenient for everyone. You have probably experienced

To summarize all the above, I would say that compared with other industries the language industry is one of the fastest-growing industries and the most interesting. Its fast pace and diversity are here to tell us that  the best is still yet to come!

Let’s see what 2018 will bring!