Translation: opt-in for a booming sector

Did you know that the global market volume for outsourced translation services reaches USD 33 billion this year? A huge sum, which also proves that machine translation expands the demand for human translation.

If you have ever tried to translate more than one word by machines accessible on the Internet, you’ll see the reason of this boom. Translation machines – especially the free ones – cannot correctly render more complex texts from one language to another. If you want your input to appear in another language authentically, you’ll need flesh and blood translators, who – by the way – may use machine translation for their work.

Globalization and the Internet boom in emerging and developing countries has created an unprecedented need for translation. According to forecasts, the job market of translators and interpreters will grow by 42 percent from 2010 to 2020, which is at least four times higher than the average global growth in jobs. More and more enterprises realize that translation may be a pathway to more revenue and new markets. Besides, governmental and non-profit organizations have also become keen on translation, partly as a result of the expansion of the huge communities as the European Union. An EU-member government should have websites available in at least two or three European languages.

With a demand so huge, many translators and translation agencies are struggling with an immense workload. Every step towards higher efficiency could become more than handy. Let me give two tips concerning these issues.

There are quite a few side effects of the process of translating various texts and these can be humps on the back of language professionals. One common difficulty occurs when translating websites: costly working hours are wasted on grabbing the content from the source website, and – after the translation is done - formatting the text and feeding it back to the site. I’m convinced no language professional is keen on performing these puny, but lengthy tasks themselves. With view to this, we have developed a tool that does all these “chores” automatically, leaving more time and energy to authentic translation work.

Another usual dilemma is how to organize the translation of bulky texts within a very limited period of time. Of course, you have to allocate the job to more professionals. But dividing and channeling pieces of texts to an array of translators can also be a tough job, as well. No wonder crowdsourced translation has become so popular. We also have an application that allows customers to easily distribute huge contents to a desired number of language professionals in a swift and organized way.

By the way, crowdsourced translation often happens spontaneously. Sometimes, customers and fans of products or services begin creating their own translations and posting them in various forums. And a lot of companies immerse in this process, encouraging voluntary translators to come up with more and more sophisticated texts or to choose the best version for a given foreign phrase.