The Future Of Translation

 

1. From The Business Of Language To The Language Of Business

  article       

This article focuses on one specific function within the broader localization picture: translation. Across businesses worldwide, there is an increasing demand for translation, driven by:

• an increase in demand for non-English languages,

• increase in products and services from non-English countries reaching foreign markets,

• an in vertical-specific translation use cases, and

• a reduction of translation, driven by improvements in AI technology and the rise of cloud-based translation platforms. These lower costs support a growing “long tail” of businesses that can profitably offer services in multiple languages.

This article discusses this new future.

Translation services at a turning point

Annual enterprise spending on translation services is expected to grow to US$45 billion by 2020, primarily driven by increasing globalization and an increasing amount of text being generated worldwide.
This growth is also being stimulated by new technology. Many organizations are using artificial intelligence (AI) in the form of machine translation (MT) to reduce the costs of translation. AI-enabled automated translation platforms like Google Translate, Microsoft Translator, and the recently released Amazon Translate have in the last 24 months taken a great leap forward in accuracy. This is for two reasons: one, they build on recent breakthrough improvements in neural machine translation (NMT) algorithms, and, two, they have access to a much larger amount of language data from search engines, social networks, and e-commerce sites.

AI and the end of translation jobs?

The recent acceleration in machine translation sophistication and reliability leads some observers to speculate that machines will essentially remove the need for expensive human translation even in the enterprise market, eliminating tens of thousands of jobs in product and service localization, publishing, marketing, and myriad other fields, even as the demand for translation explodes.

Translating the long tail

The number of languages and language pairs now handled by the most advanced translation platforms represents only a small fraction of the languages spoken across even the developed world. But translating content into languages beyond the 40 or so supported by the largest language service providers (LSP) and by enterprise software vendors has, to date, been difficult or impossible to cost-justify: for most companies, the cost and time required to add just one new language to a product has been measured in the millions of dollars and years of time.
Those barriers are about to be shattered by the combination of scale efficiencies enabled by cloud-based platforms and translator productivity improvements enabled by machine translation.

https://www.digitalistmag.com/future-of-work/2018/05/17/future-of-translation-worldwide-06168565




2. language translation at multi-lingual congregations

the UN General Assembly work

At multinational events there are usually glass booths at the back of the auditorium where interpreters work in pairs, ideally switching off every 15-30 minutes. They use headphones to listen to what is being said, and simultaneously interpret it into a microphone that communicates with the headsets of people who need the interpretation. 

Some agencies have their own interpreters and some contract with translation companies. 

• When there is no interpreter available for a language pair (say, an Azerbaijani speaker and a Spanish-speaking audience), chain interpretation is used: the Spanish interpreter will listen to another linguist's interpretation into a language he or she understands (perhaps English or Russian) and interpret from that into Spanish. This is not ideal, but is fairly common. 

• Agencies that have their own translators/interpreters usually have their own testing and standards for hiring. Simultaneous interpretation is not usually validated, because of its on-the-spot nature, although the second interpreter may listen and provide written prompts to his or her partner or even interrupt in the event of an egregious error.   

• However, a transcript or recording of an interpretation can be validated later by a second translator with a recording or speaker's text of the speech, or by anyone with an official translation of the speech. (For a graduate school paper, I once compared the official Spanish text of a speech by Fidel Castro to the UN with two English transcripts published in journals. The only significant error I found in the English transcripts was where the interpreter had rendered a phrase a bit awkwardly as "sea resources" and the transcriber misheard it as "key resources.")

Simultaneous interpretation usually runs between half a sentence and a sentence behind the speaker. It is tempting to stay closer than that, but the result is an overly literal interpretation that doesn't sound natural and is hard to understand.

(e.g., United Nations Language Careers, FBI Linguist/Translation Program). The American Translators Association offers professional interpretation and translation tests in many languages; an ATA Certification is highly respected and required by some agencies and translation companies. There are also official tests for state (e.g., Court Interpreters Program (CIP), For Interpreters)  and federal court interpreting (FCICE Home).