TOP 3 trends in the translation industry for 2021

What direction will the translation market take after economy disruption of 2020? Has the previous year shifted the course of the language industry? Read our article to find out what trends will shape the translation business in the coming months.

 In Poland, the translation industry has been among the few markets that were not largely affected by the coronavirus pandemic. There are two main reasons for that. Firstly, the main recipients of translation services, such as the power industry, IT and telecom markets, medicine, and gaming sectors have not experienced major setbacks and some have even grown during the last couple of months. Secondly, most translation companies have already been accustomed to remote work. In Bireta, the infrastructure, as well as procedures necessary for home office set-up, have been implemented for some years now. Thanks to that, we were able to seamlessly switch to operating remotely.

For these reasons, the trends we are seeing now are not much different from what we expected to happen. Some of them however have sped up considerably. Find out what we think is going to dominate the language market in the coming months.

Neural Machine Translation + human post-editing

This is the continuation of a trend that has been shaping the language industry for the past couple of years. Neural Machine Translation is now a standard service offered by most renowned Translation Services Providers. Machine translation technology is becoming more and more advanced. In 2020, as part of our cooperation with a leading translation technologies company Tilde, we have begun testing MT Dynamic Learning. [https://slator.com/press-releases/tilde-mt-dynamic-learning-latest-innovation-in-neural-machine-translation/]. This technology can pick up human corrections of machine-translated text in real-time and significantly boosts the quality of MT.

We have also observed a considerable shift in the client’s attitude towards NMT. Before, a lot of our customers were apprehensive when they heard that we are offering machine translation. What they often had in their mind, was the image of the translation agency simply putting their documents through Google Translate and then sending it back to them. We had to explain that while GT might also be using neural network-based technology, our solutions differ entirely.

  • We use several different NMT engines and select the ones that provide the best results for a given text
  • Using the professional NMT engines allows us to protect the security and privacy of the translated documents
  • What is most important, at Bireta we always proofread texts produced by the neural engine and make sure that the translation is as accurate as a human translation. This quality control process is ISO 18587 certified.

Now, clients are more open to being offered NMT and see the benefits of the technology, i.e. lower costs and faster service. Therefore, we expect that the demand for NMT will keep growing, and as the technology keeps getting more advanced, it will become an industry standard among all TSPs.

Neural Speech Translation

Recent years brought significant advancements in machine translation (MT) and automatic speech recognition (ASR) technologies. Free web applications, such as Deepl and Google Translate are now more accurate than ever and include more and more languages. It has become common among people to streamline multilingual communication in their everyday lives. The state of speech-to-speech translation now resembles what machine translation was only a couple of years ago. Therefore we expect to see further progress in neural speech translation in the coming months and years.

According to a report by Mordor Intelligence LLP, the speech-to-speech market is expected to hit growth at a CAGR of 9.4% in the 2021-2025 period. Another indicator of the coming advancement in this technology is the fact, that one of the largest Chinese technology companies, ByteDance, best known for the development of the highly popular short video app TikTok, has taken an active interest in developing the technology. ByteDance has released an open-source toolkit for neural speech translation. The final aim is, of course, to extend its use to develop advanced speech translation research and products. US tech giants, such as Google and Microsoft, have already been working on their own NST products for some years.  As more and more companies invest their money in developing neural speech translation technologies, we expect it to be the next hot topic for the language industry.

Remote interpreting

Before the pandemic, remote interpreting was somewhat of a niche solution. Since the worldwide outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, almost all of the face-to-face events had to be turned into video meetings or online conferences. Zoom, one of the leading video-conferencing platforms, in June released information that its revenue increased 169% compared to the prior year, reaching $328 at the end of April 2021. [source: https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/02/tech/zoom-earnings-coronavirus/index.html]. With all the social distancing restrictions in place, remote interpreting has taken center stage and became the new standard for the interpreting services market.

And even though we hope that the pandemic will soon come to an end, even with restrictions being removed we expect that a lot of companies will stick to the virtual event format. Therefore, remote interpreting will stay with us for good.