The first month of 2020 and the new decade is almost over. We have already examined our achievements in the past year. Now it is time to look into the future.
What trends will dominate the translation industry in Poland in the coming months? What challenges await Polish translation agencies in 2020?
Post-editing machine translation PEMT – the new standard
Machine translations are nothing new. The first attempts at machine translation were made as early as the 1950s. The breakthrough in this area was in 2006 when Google launched its automatic translation tool. Since then, machine translations have taken a major leap forward in technology. Google Translate fails, which used to circulate on the web, causing widespread amusement, are becoming increasingly rare. The statistical method of machine-translation, which was initially used by the Google translator and other automatic translation tools, is slowly disappearing from the market. It is being replaced by NMT (neural machine translation), which is a method of machine translation based on neural networks capable of deep learning. Although this technology is no longer a novelty on the market, it is still developing very rapidly and the translation industry is constantly working to make the most of its capabilities. We, therefore, anticipate that in 2020, neural machine translation will continue to dominate the market even further.
The use of machine translation engines is now a standard among Language Services Providers. However, it is crucial to remember that even machine translations made using NMT engines are still far from perfect. Raw texts generated by a machine should be approached with caution. They can be useful if we want to understand the general meaning of the text or if we know both the source and the target language reasonably well. For the translation to be professional and usable, it is necessary to edit the text, i.e. to have it corrected and verified by an experienced posteditor. The final result of machine translation after the proofreading process should be indistinguishable from human translation. Besides, post-editing machine translation is often faster, and thus more cost-effective than translating a text from scratch.
As mentioned in the Nimdzi 2020 report, the machine translation trend has globally plateaued. However, the Polish LSP market still has some catching up to do. We expect that in the nearest future, machine translation with post-editing will become the Polish language industry standard, and the demand for translators specializing in post-editing will increase.
Transcreation – speak the language of your client
Transcreation is in a way the opposite trend to translation automation. What exactly is transcreation? There is still an ongoing debate among language industry professionals about the definition of this term. To put things simply, it is a more specialized type of translation, which is a combination of localization and creative content creation. The key point of transcreation is adapting the entire marketing message for a given market.
As globalization progresses, more and more companies are expanding into foreign markets. At the same time, more and more companies also understand the need to properly adapt their message to the customers in particular markets. Translating a website and marketing materials into a foreign language is not enough. You have to consider the values and needs of foreign clients are and adapt all your communication to them. This is what transcreation does.
Although this type of service has been on the market for some time, we predict that the demand for transcreation will grow in the coming months.
Asian markets – the new directions
In 2020, the GDP of Asian countries is projected to be more than the total GDP of all the other countries in the world. The fastest-growing markets now include not only India and China, but also the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand. We anticipate that these economic trends will also translate (pun intended 😉) into trends in the translation industry. We will observe greater demand for translations in the language combination with Mandarin, which is also influenced by Chinese expansion on foreign markets. We are also expecting more requests for translations into less popular Asian languages and localization services for the Asian markets.
This is certainly not all that will be happening in the translation industry in the next twelve months. The language services market has more than doubled over the last twenty years and is expected to continue to grow. We’re heading into a very interesting time for LSPs!