The 4 Trends That Will Shape the Translation Industry by 2023

With global interconnection on the rise and people demanding even more customized and relevant experiences, the translation industry is advancing by leaps and bounds. In fact, in the last ten years, the market has doubled and today it reaches almost 60 billion dollars.

Primarily in commercial sectors, globalization creates new ways to interact.  Therefore, the development of linguistic services is so fast that it proves challenging to keep up sometimes. What are the main trends for 2023?

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

As in other sectors, the adoption of AI in the translation industry is already in process. Access to an extensive mass of data, which can be processed with even more efficiency each day, is one of the key elements of this breakthrough.

The adoption of cloud-based machine translation services and the increasing demand for multilingual content is expected to take the machine translation global market to USD 4,069.5 million by 2030.
Source:  GlobeNewswire

And even if the accuracy of translations varies considerably depending on the quality of the original text, type of content, language and structure, the truth is that quality has improved significantly. In addition, businesses have the option of boosting the power of AI with the contribution of professional linguists.

In that sense, a growing number of organizations opt for the Human-in-the-Loop approach, whereby humans check machine translation outputs and make stylistic changes and appropriate improvements. It is these interventions that upgrade the quality of translation softwares.

Video Translation and Dubbing

The consumption of video content has been growing exponentially since the onset of the pandemic. People are using more and more videos to get informed, get inspired or just black out for a bit. They buy, share, learn and play, among other activities. This is why reaching audiences through video content is paramount.

In 2021, Netflix subtitled 7 million minutes of content and dubbed 5 million minutes.
Source:  Slator

Content localization and video translation into diverse languages helps increase the chances of attracting potential clients from different countries. While, at the same time, the demand for dubbing services in this format increases, especially for those who bet on creativity.

New Technologies and Transcreation

Translation of text within static images from a video and lip-synced machine translation of face-to-face videos are within the new possibilities. Maximizing all aspects of the communication experience is the real challenge and technology seems to be moving that way.

Also, these improvements carry a deep understanding of human emotions and our cultural nuances. For this reason, brands not only rely on new technologies, but they also aim for transcreation: the creation of multilingual content in a creative way, which is especially useful for translating advertising and marketing messages.

Specialization

Even though English remains the dominant language, the large number of existing languages around the globe creates opportunities for language-specialization, particularly in certain fields such as technical, medical or legal translation, among others.

eLearning platforms seem to be a trend to explore as well among professionals of the industry, since its demand continues to be on the rise. Even e-commerce will continue to expand, while businesses attempt to satisfy their clients’ needs. There are different niches in which specialization becomes a priority, mainly if the goal is to achieve inclusive translations. There is a huge difference between translations that target children, teenagers or older adults.

The number of users in the video games industry is estimated to reach 3,041.3 million by 2027.
Source:  Statista

Likewise, localization for video games is among the fastest growing area of services in the linguistic industry and is becoming one of the most promising niches. As the market becomes more globalized and complex, editors and developers demand specialized linguistic services.

Like every year, the industry faces new challenges. It is experienced professionals who rise to the challenge and stand out when all that really matters is to continue breaking linguistic barriers.