A recent research report by Global Market Insights Inc. has revealed a bright future for the machine translation market, with the overall market revenue said to grow to USD 3 billion by 2027. We take a look at the reasons behind this unprecedented growth spurt.
Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine translation (MT) are being used increasingly all over the world. These innovative systems advance technology used in tourism and offer clever products that can be applied to multiple business settings. Machine translation can take the form of written language-oriented text translation as well as spoken language-oriented phonetic translation, both of which have been said to revolutionise many industries, resulting in digital transformation and new business models.
Major players in the machine translation market include the likes of Google LLC, Amazon.com Inc. and Alibaba Cloud – all these big multinational companies that rely on their services and products being translated into a multitude of languages.
Key reasons behind growth
Naturally, the growing internationalisation of businesses means that companies need to provide services and product information in several languages. While the use of human translators sometimes requires additional review stages, occasionally there are errors left undiscovered. To ensure accuracy and consistency in interpreting data quickly and in a fully automated way, big multinational companies are increasingly adopting machine translation software to go alongside their human counterparts.
This is where the growing demand for content localisation plays a crucial role. The use of machine translation technology not only allows faster translation – it can also help to substantially improve the productivity of human translators. After machine translation software does its thing, a human translator can perform localisation, translation and terminology work – a more efficient way for many companies to approach translation. In other words, it’s not a case of either/or, but machine translation technologies can really bring out the best in human linguists and language professionals, allowing them to focus on the intricacies and nuances that machine translation simply can’t deal with.
Last but not least, advanced AI and machine learning technologies are fuelling the adoption of voice assistants such as Google Home, Alexa and Siri, and this is in turn contributing to the growth of the machine translation market. The same can be said for the increasing use of smart home devices among consumers.
While machine translation offerings are not fully perfect yet, they are making their way into the everyday dealings of many businesses. But until they are able to interpret cultural differences and make sense of different word meanings, human translators are here.