The rise of machine translations

The translation industry, like every other industry, changes from year to year. Most of this is due to the ever-increasing importance of machine translations which, even though they aren’t as sophisticated as the human brain, have still undergone huge improvements in their accuracy levels. This trend is set to continue into and through 2019. However, there is no expectation that this technology will cut out the need for human translators at least not in 2019.

Increase in demand by businesses for machine translations

With online stores taking over more and more from the high street retailer even to the point that they have an international presence due to global accessibility to internet businesses are seeking affordable, cost-effective translation methods. Because there are terabytes involved they are prepared to accept lower quality machine translations at least for material that’s easy to translate and where minor errors don’t matter. This trend is set to pickup this year. Businesses may be thinking twice before using free unsecure translation tools, such as Bing and Google Translate because of the hike in security breaches in recent years. They will be seeking more security.

Increase in demand for video translation

There is no stopping the use of video on the internet as a global marketing strategy in 2019. Cisco suggests that by 2021 video will be making up more than 80 per cent of internet traffic. As a global marketing tool videos will need to be localised and translated in order to meet the global market. There will be more subtitles and live to the stream of video content. LSPs will be required to not just translate words but they will have to make sure the translations are both linguistically and culturally appropriate for all the targeted markets.

Voice recognition will change multilingual SEO

Voice recognition is set to take away the need for keyboards and will be the heart of SEO in 2019. So far using voice searches puts a business a step ahead because it’s preferred by search engines like Google. This implies there will be more demand for multilingual experts who can translate voice searches as required. This will be the only way for a business to survive in the internet quagmire. A business will need to get its translator to optimize its site for both standard search and voice search.

Translators will have to start to learn some new translation methods before the year is out.