Our technological world is powered by content. Content enables us to connect, buy and sell products to each other, keep each other informed and helps us to share our creative conquests. It’s safe to say that content is at the core of everything we do. The amount of content we consume continues to grow exponentially and due to increased internet accessibility around the world, the requirement for content to be translated to reach these new internet users in their own preferred language will increase as well.
This will lead to the development and growth of the technology associated with content localization. Key developments in automation, Neural Machine Translation as well as AI-driven services will unlock hidden potential and push localization and translation into the future of technology.
1. Increasing Translation Demand Every year the amount of users consuming content online increases. Last year this figure was around 4.4 billion people. That results in 2 trillion google searches alone per year. Now if we take into consideration these 4.4 billion users, out of them: 2.3 billion are Asian, 700 million are European, 453 million are South American and 175 million are from the Middle East. When we compare these figures with 327 million from North America, the global reach of content seems a lot bigger and along with it the need for translation and localization.
2. The Rise of Machine Translation The potential of machine translation has been gaining in the past few years. Modern Neural Machine Translation(NMT) engines are created to replicate how the human mind learns and as a result gains more knowledge over time. These software look to comprehend the exact context of the content that is being translated to accurately predict the correct word choice.
The applications and development of NMT will only increase over time as we discover more real-world applications for the technology. Most prominently with major Language Service Providers and Enterprise organizations as these models are capable of learning and adapting to a precise domain based on the prior translated content.
3. The Increased Importance of Specialized Content As the world becomes more global, there will be a strong focus on providing authentic and specialized user experiences. This will lead to the growth of transcreation.
Transcreation is a process that involves adapting content from one language to another without changing the existing tone, intent and style. Basically, it means creating new content that is based on and inspired by the original source content.
This process ensures that the general message, theme and tone remain constant while the content is altered to suit the new market’s cultural nuances and preferences. This process requires professional human translators and as yet, cannot be performed by an adapting MT engine alone.
4. Even More AI and Automation Globally, AI augmentation is expected to create tremendous business value and increase productivity by the year 2021. By leveraging AI in hyper automation and AI in translation management will create new methods for simplifying the translation workflow. The use of AI in localization and translation will also improve quality, support existing work and help us make better decisions.
5. New Content Channels Our demand for content will continue to increase. This will result in new content mediums becoming popular as they look to create a strong foothold for their brand identity.
Video has emerged as the biggest contributor to consuming content on the internet. Popular search engines have been including videos in the search results and many famous brands are leveraging video content in their marketing campaigns. Notably, all these videos will be required to be translated and localized.
Another channel that will require translation and localization is voice. Most people have a digital assistant on their phones or have a smart device at home. The personalized nature of these devices makes it certain that it will need accurate translation and localization of content.
6. Multilingual Support Brands that are trying to expand to new audiences will have to focus on language accessibility. Language accessibility initially starts with only localizing brand experience and product offering but in the final stages requires localized support as well. Proper customer support is a critical aspect of the customer lifecycle.
Localized support tools like multilingual chatbots, translated help centers and native-speaking customer service executives will help brands to engage with their customers and ensure that they keep coming back, regardless of the language they speak.
In Conclusion
In the past decade, we have experienced many changes that have impacted the localization and translation industry. As everything is shifting to the cloud, it will allow the world to become even more accessible and information to flow freely.
Accurately translating visual context has become a vital element of translation for our platform and linguists. Also, companies are now far more agile and quick than before when it comes to buying, strategy and crucially, the ability to produce content.
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