Imagine the future of translation
After GALA Sevilla and the inspiring keynote speakers Meritxell Guitart, Jochen Hummel, and Paula Shannon, as well as a high number of talks in Sevilla with leaders from this wonderful translation world, I've been thinking about the future of the our industry. Good challenges ahead. Lionbridge revenue in 2014 was above $490 million, and Transperfect, the largest privately owned company in our industry, grew 17% last year. People want to understand, companies want to sell.
Language and translation are more important than ever! At the same time, many of the manual tasks are being replaced not only by technology and automation, but also by creativity. Companies are trying to reduce text, so as to focus on the message and they are using image and video everywhere. This might be the reason why companies like Hogarth WorldWide are growing that fast, their DNA is adapted to our current times. There are other companies such as Smartling that are here to disrupt the market, i.e. conquer a multi-billion dollar market after a huge Venture Capital (VC) investment. How can SME in the translation industry evolve not to disappear?
On the other side, people are creating content all the time, and helping others for free on the Internet. Terabytes of data are created every minute: this is Big (Huge) Data. How can we make this available in several languages without incurring in the high costs from the translation services we are used to? Certainly, different business models are needed for this multilingual enablement. Not many companies think differently from the price per word or by the hour, so the market clearly needs a shift, a disruption. If you think about existing Multilingual Big Data, translation might be free in the near future, but other services on top of it would provide the profit for companies in the industry. Freemium translation services or other models based on success rate? Who knows, but what is sure is that the models that have been used for many years might be replaced by new innovative business relationships in the near future.
Machines are already communicating to other machines in their own language. As Eric Schmidt stated some months ago in Davos, Internet will disappear, because it will be so embedded in our everyday life, that we won't have the feeling of being connected or disconnected anymore. How can we exploit the possibilities of the machine to machine communication? I'm impressed by products and technologies such as Amazon Echo, wearables, self-driving cars, or drones that will be everywhere very soon. And these machines will be communicating all the time. Are we doing something already? Maybe we should start.
Crowdsourcing, the power of the people all around the world, everyone with a powerful machine in their pocket ready to contribute, 24x7, 365 days a year. This changes the world. If you are not adding value for your customers using new approaches to solve their pains, new VC-backed start-ups like Gengo will take the lead and might put your company out of business. Be careful, there are so many others all around the world! Perhaps the future of the language industry is more related to monolingual tech developments rather than multilingual.
There are so many trends ... Therefore, I'm pretty sure that the best strategy is not to link everything together, but rather start in a niche and conquer it, then the next one, and so on, but applying lean principles and a customer development process at the same time. The risk is high, but so are the gains. The winner will be the first billion dollar company in our industry.
Your bet?
If technology makes a real difference in translation, the market will be capital driven with high barriers and with a few players dominating it. The picture that we get from reality is the opposite: thousands of small agencies fiercely competing with each other and the 10 largest translation companies representing less than 1% of the total spend. If you make a huge investing here, your ROI will be very dubious at least and only a fool will take the risk. Translation, as a human activity, will survive, but the margin will be lower as we are all pushing down on prices and quality, creating a negative spiral that force qualified people out of the business to become copy writers, journalist, writers or so.
Elettra Languages co-founder and French translator, transcreator & copywriter
9yAs I could read from a few comments, the market will most likely follow 2 opposite trends: 1 technology hungry (big) part looking for faster turnarounds, smaller prices, etc. Developments in MT & CAT tools will be key to this side of the market of course. On the other hand, the requests for more precise, refined and "pretty" translations (and more) and redacted content will not shrink. Many companies need quality multilingual contents and not only translations... whether these contents will end up in a text, a video or a podcast, they will still need to be redacted by professional native speakers. Many people consider this part of the market as a niche nowaways but I can only see it grow significantly in the coming years.
Dipl-Inform.
9yVictor Dewsbery I agree with all the points you made, but I'm going to push you on dictation. Even long sentences can be dictated as clauses and shuffled around afterwards. I know a number of translators who use it for patent translation. I'm not saying dictation works in all instances but it is worth trying. PM me if you get around to it as there are a few tricks to optimising Dragon. Also, I'd prefer not to leave the pencil metaphor dangling. It is good that you use DVX2. DejaVu is a great CAT tool and Atril pioneered many of the productivity enhancing features you find in other CAT tools. Autowrite is not available in Lionbridge's production environment. They sell translation but their upper management seem to understand very little about how translation is produced at the word face. As a largish client of ours it is very frustrating to be forced to work in an environment that hampers our productivity relative to Trados, MemoQ or OmegaT. The irony that we even have to pay a license fee to use the software or we don't get the work is not lost on us. Paula's talk was worrying because it showed me that their technology focus now is on finding translators for cheaper and cheaper word rates via blind bidding. A better approach would be to look at what they can do to improve the productivity of those translator who are already working for them at a fundamental level by opening up their TM API (Application Programming Interface) to the tools translators use on a daily basis and providing their own CAT tool as a free alternative. I realise for you that is something you can cheerfully ignore. Unfortunately, as a supplier to Paula's company, we don't have that luxury.
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9ySpecialization will be always good for your business! If you deliver what you promise, your future certainly looks bright. Thanks for your comment.