Market explosion

What is the next big thing?

Not a long time ago, having a high-quality website meant that a company had the resources to invest in significant expenditures: they had the money to hire a web design firm, set up an in-house web development department and plan for the ongoing costs of web maintenance, programming and content management, all requiring IT expertise. Solutions were often tailor-made for big corporations at hefty costs. Smaller players could find cheaper solutions that often looked semi-professional, withholding many from even having a website.

Around 2004, easy-to-use content management systems started to spring up – WordPress, the most successful, continues to thrive to this day, offering a platform for anyone who wants a website. These solutions opened the gates to the masses: small and medium businesses, mom and pop shops and plenty of private users. Entry and maintenance costs fell as IT expertise of running a basic website became unnecessary.

There is a similar development happening in the website localization market nowadays. The need to localize websites has been realized from early on, yet only the privileged few could afford all the hassle it took to come up with a translated website. High costs of content extraction/import, IT tweaks and maintenance issues all created barriers to website localization. The translation proxy came as a localization-democratizing innovation around 2010 and it’s just getting the attention of the industry. At this point, it’s gaining approval among LSPs and clients alike. However, the big boom is still ahead of us. Currently, the website localization business is a $4 Billion market a year – while the number of non-translated but wanna-be-translated websites is tremendous, and continues growing.

For LSPs, now is the time to step in and make use of the translation proxy technology. There is an almost unlimited amount of business opportunities to harvest. Figuring out sales approaches and selling translation to smaller clients (the so-called “long tail”) is a challenge that carries excellent earning opportunities.