The translation industry is never still – which means we are constantly exploring new ways to provide you with an even better and faster service. Take a look with us, as we peek into the near future and see some of the big language and translation trends that will dominate in 2020.
1. More languages needed
Maybe the heading is slightly misleading. We’re not saying that we THINK there is a need for more languages. It’s what the world’s internet users are demanding. The number of non-English speaking internet users is increasing. All over the world, ever greater numbers of groups of
people are going online, which requires translations into new languages. ‘New’ as in new online. Just take a look at internet users in the Middle East and Africa where the numbers are exploding – the text can’t just be in English when they go online. This means that companies who want to stay competitive in international markets – especially in new and growing markets – are going to have to translate their texts into many more languages.
Did you know that …
… not only does World Translation have an extensive network of talented freelance
translators who translate into their own native language, but we also speak 11 different languages in-house? In other words, there’s always likely to be someone in the office who speaks your language.
Click here to see all of our employees and their contact information.
2. Neural machine translation
Machine translation has been around for a while now. The principle of machine translation can be traced back to the 17th century but it wasn’t until the 1950s that researchers systematically worked with machine translation. In recent years, the most exciting development in automated translation has been neural machine translation (NMT). NMT uses large quantities of data fed into an artificial neural network to predict the likelihood of a sequence of words, typically
modelling entire sentences in a single integrated model. It learns by doing. In other words, artificial translation intelligence. NMT is constantly improving and being refined and is expected to become even better in the next decade.
That kind of technological capability keeps a lot of anxious translators awake at night. But it’s
important to point out that machine translation cannot replace the professional living-and-breathing translator. After all, the machine doesn’t ‘know’ what it’s reading or what it’s writing in the sense that you and I do. But there are lots of circumstances where using machine translation makes perfect sense. To learn why and when it makes good business sense to use machine translation, click here.
3. E-learning
The market for e-learning and webinars has grown strongly in recent years and it is forecast to grow even more in the years ahead! There is a huge demand for training and learning across
industries and different types of companies, and across countries. However, sending employees to distant locations to participate in long training courses or seminars can be very expensive. Often companies are just far too busy to allow a whole day to be spent on this kind of activity. It is also a well-known fact that participants get the most benefit from shorter sessions, because your concentration tends to weaken dramatically after many continuous hours on a course. Much better if the teaching is fast, effective and as inexpensive as possible. This is where
technology comes into play – with the right technology, there is a huge potential for e-learning. However, a lot of e-learning content is still written in English. In other words, demand for
translation in this market is destined to increase.
4. Video translation and subtitling
Video is everywhere and it is a great tool for capturing people’s attention. Video is used
everywhere these days – on your website, in your marketing material, in your in-house training courses – you name it. Video captures people’s attention for longer than any other kind of
format. This means that the demand for video translation and professional translators who
understand time codes, transcribing and subtitling is going to continue to grow. Speaking of
subtitles: Just think about how your videos will suffer if they are watched on a mobile device while the owner is in a hurry – perhaps even he or she is watching your videos without any sound. Subtitles are your best friend – they have an important role to play in the dissemination of what your videos are trying to say.
5. Automation and integration solutions - WordPress, Sitecore, EPiServer and more
The diversity and number of internet users around the world is exploding – so it is now more
important than ever that your website has a language version that is relevant to your customers. Identifying and managing all of the pages and texts that need to be translated into several
languages, extracting the content from your CM system, sending this for translation into an
editable format and then implementing the translations into the correct pages once the texts are ready, can be a time consuming, exhausting and let’s face it, overwhelming process.
Luckily help is at hand! Automation solutions now exist that take care of it all, so you can spend your time doing the important stuff rather that copying and pasting texts all over the place. A
direct integration between your content management system and the language service provider’s software will save you a lot of manual work. It doesn’t matter which CMS you use – there are integration solutions for most of them.
World Translation is an official WPML translation service partner. So if you are a WordPress user, then you can use the WPML plugin to send your texts for translation with a few clicks of the mouse and get the translated texts back and inserted into the right places
automatically.
To learn more about our integrated solution and your options, click here.
We hope you found inspiration and learned something new in this post.
