4 Trends for The Translation Industry in 2020

1. New Language Demand

As time progresses and markets expand, different languages will be in high demand. For 2020 it is predicted that the language that will be in high demand is, Chinese (Mandarin). Ethnologue, a source of information on the world’s languages, estimates “estimates the number of native speakers at almost 1.2 billion, roughly a billion of whom speak Mandarin. 
This makes it the most spoken language in the world, and the second-most utilized online behind English (25.4 percent).”

This Business Wire stated, “The growing tourism industry in countries such as China, India, Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, and many more is contributing to the demand for speech-to-speech translation.”

“The number of companies looking for Mandarin-speaking employees has grown by 35% when compared to the previous years and the experts predict that China will become an economic powerhouse in the globalized economy,” stated AGATO. Thus, China will become an important economic power and the language, Chinese (Mandarin) will follow also have a sense of importance in the Translation Industry.  
There are new technologies developed to solve this rising demand for speech-to-speech translation if there is a new language demand.
 

2. Voice Search

The traditional method is manually typing a question or statement into a search box that would be answered by a search engine or a digital assistant like Siri, for example. Now, there has been a steady development of a new method, Voice Search. Voice Search allows users to use technology like smartphones, computers, smart devices to search the internet by asking a question or stating a phrase, verbally. It has become a popular and accepted method among all age groups. 

ComScore predicts that by 2020, 50% of all online searches will be performed by a voice search. Also, A Gartner Study anticipates that by 2020, 30% of all browsing sessions will include voice search. 

In February 2019, Dr. Alexander Waibel, a professor at Computer Science at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) Germany and at Carnegie Mellon University developed with his team, JANUS, a speech translation system. Furthermore, Waibel invented Jibbigo, the first commercial speech translator in iPhones, and more recently the first real-time simultaneous speech translation system for lectures.

But is there any technology being developed for a more global, widespread audience? 

Yes- in May 2019 on Google’s AI Blog, they announced a new system called Translatotron. It will offer speech-to-text translation. This system would be the first end-to-end model that can directly translate speech from one language into speech in another language. It is also able to retain the source speaker’s voice in the translated speech.” This system, Translatotron, is a kick-start to Google’s end goal, end-to-end, speech-to-speech translation systems.

3. Video Translation 

Video Translation is the process of having audio and video professionals who take the video footage provided and create subtitles for various languages wanted and/or needed. It can include short-form videos on YouTube or long-form videos on services like Hulu, Netflix, etc.

In the latest Cisco Study Visual Networking Index (VNI) forecasts, “1 million minutes of video will be streamed or downloaded every second in 2021. The world will be watching 3 trillion minutes of Internet video per month by 2021.” Videos are on the rise so much so that, “Video will represent 80% of all Internet traffic by 2021.”
“Facebook might be hosting upwards of 8 billion views per day on its platform, but a wide majority of that viewership is happening in silence. As much as 85 percent of video views happen with the sound off, according to multiple publishers,” according to DIGIDAY. 

The demand for video translation will remain to accelerate and rapidly too. 

Globalization

The interactions and integration of groups of people or companies have allowed the Translation Industry to enlarge. Companies need of switching to multilingual services has increased. Annual enterprise spending on translation services is expected to grow to USD $56.18 billion by 2021, primarily driven by increasing globalization. 

For example, Sri Sharma from Net Media Planet says on average businesses witness a 20% increase in conversions when they translate landing pages and ads. Additionally, websites that completely localized their content see a 70% rise.

For further information about language translation and transliteration, contact us at Lingual Consultancy Services. We are a professional translation company providing language services in more than 250 languages covering all the major Indian, Asian, European, Latin American and African Languages.