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 method for our industry. Why? Because the language industry despite its challenges really did grow. The growth experienced is expected to create a wave into 2018, according 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 variety of languages, cultural beliefs, habits and lifestyle of nations all over the globe. This close connection stimulates the integration of markets, commerce and communication and brings us closer together.

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

People are talking that the MT can be able to compete with the human translators in 2018, however we consider it highly unlikely that MT wins the battle when it comes to the quality. Nevertheless, a point that we can add to the MT is that, machine will always be faster, than a human will.  We can agree also that human evaluations of MT are extensive and can be very expensive, however humans can help the machines work better, isn’t that a provocative idea that machines are better than humans?
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 (Neural MT);
Almost 2 years after its appearance in the translation industry, NMT is the most commented topic for the MT world. According to @Slator, the leading IT companies like Microsoft, Google, Facebook, have all transitioned to NMT, as 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 (Adaptive MT)
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, translate faster with smarter MT suggestions, it is easy to use and get started with. 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

Translation of the 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 kind of pick and can you imagine what will happen in 2018 – total bum.
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.
Last month we shared with you and article about the best applications in the translation industry for 2017, let 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 everyday by one and a half billion users. 70% of the people using Youtube are not located in United States, the majority of people are not even Anglophones. These numbers can only show us the increasing call for video translation and localization – the headlining trend for the current year and apparently high demanding for 2018.  This trend totally changed the meaning of the video marketing and content marketing, which is linked with the content translation. We have noted this in our company the marketing content is getting more and more popular and wanted.
International companies can notably increase the capability of their videos by customizing the content and language of the video to reach the target audience.
If the visualization of your video is set translated well, 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

The Voiceover technique is highlighting a voice audio track, which is not a component of the narrative. If your original video has already voiceover, it would be pace 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.
As far as the dubbing, I would say that this is preferred method in some cultures. People love to listen is their native language, what we have heard from our parents and elderly people is that the subtitles are changing to fast and the pleasure from the movie is lost. This is not the case with the young adults; they prefer original movies/videos, with subtitles, this is another method for them to learn the language.
That is the reason in most of the countries to have cinemas for movies without dubbing and separate cinemas for dubbed movies.

Captioning

The primary idea of captions were to help people with damaged hearing, however nowadays, a social media has made captioning convenient for all the people, you have experienced this for sure –  the “autoplay” function on social media feeds.
Have you noticed how videos are starting to play automatically when they pop up on a Facebook or Twitter newsfeed? What does it mean? That the audience can click or not on the video, the drive would be the visual attractiveness of the video, nevertheless lots of them can run without a sound. Adding captions makes it possible for the video to transmit its message regardless of whether the viewer clicked on it or turned on the audio.

To summarize all above, I would say that comparing with other industries the language industry is one of the fastest growing industries and the most interesting,  the best is still yet to come!
Let’s see what’s brings  2018!