Since the start of the recession, we noticed an increasing number of companies from different industries which were forced to do major economic and staff cutbacks, or even “retire” from the market. How about the translation industry, was it affected by the recession?
Translation and localization can pay huge dividends
Taking place on an international level, nobody can stop a recession, and the only thing that can be done is to reduce the money loss and continue to produce new ideas which will help fight it.
The translation industry being “recession-proof”
At the same time, there are industries which, not only get to maintain their status, but also notice a slight growth. One of them is the translation industry, which lately experienced a compound annual growth rate of 12.17%.
What made the translating industry “recession-proof”?
- The continuous process of globalization
- The number of business transactions across borders has increased
- The lack of negative influence that could be brought by Free Web-Based translation programs
- The fact that many translation agencies embraced technology , determining more efficient translations and bringing faster dead-lines
The Translation Industry Success
As a result on the increase of diverse population in the U.S., a Bureau of Labor Statistics predicted a growth of 42% in the employment of interpreters and translators from 2010 to 2020. The need in the translation industry for these qualified experts has already started to show thanks to business relations, the army and many organizations.
Free automated translation machines have also played a positive role, showing the average person the need for translations. The growth of technology brought the development of Computer Aided Translation tools (CAT) which help translators deliver projects more efficiently and with a shorter dead-line. Of course, these tools are obsolete in the absence of a translator’s fluency and experience.
Research made by Nataly Kelly, chief research officer with Common Sense Advisory, shows that translation companies that embrace these technologies show much faster growing rates than the companies who don’t. The market for outsourced language services is $33.5 billion this year. While this market is fragmented into more than 26,000 companies around the world, only nine of them made more than $100 million in 2011 in revenue.
The future
In 2024, the translation industry will probably look very different. Game-changing technologies are in the process of building a standard shift. Online translation machines may be woefully inefficient now, but with the rapid progress of artificial intelligence, it’s a matter of time before machine knowledge breaks the code of language translation.
This early success for automatic translation tools soon faded when businesses realized the clumsy translations spell out nonsense in another language. Marketers targeting clients in a foreign language rely massively on the accuracy of human translators.
The benefits humans have over machines is creativity. Machines can only foretell outcomes based on the data they have. Technology may be growing, but so is human nature. Unique environments surface, and computers cannot adjust to these changes until they have the data to read from.
Translators survive by concentrating in a highly-skilled area. The translation industry that will arguably offer the most opportunities to language translators is marketing.
The most important aspect in the translation industry is delivering the most accurate translation possible so the message you send doesn’t lose its meaning.
