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Covid-19 has greatly influenced businesses around the world. From 2023-24 till date, things have changed a lot for the translation industry just like any other sector. Fortunately, unlike other industries that suffered great losses during the pandemic, things are going well for the translation business.
The translation market has experienced great growth in 2023, and the future seems even brighter. So, what should we expect from the translation industry in 2023-24?
New opportunities are opening up for translation business on a global scale. Businesses are investing in translations, and the demand for localized brands is higher than ever before. It seems like translation industry trends are going to dominate the business world in the coming years.
In this blog post, we’ll analyze the translation industry trends, demands, market size, innovations, and future predictions. So, let’s get right into it.
How Big Is the Translation Industry?
Market Size
In 2023, the global translation market size is valued at around $39.37 billion which is expected to increase to $46.22 billion by the year 2028. Global expansion of businesses leads to higher translation service demand worldwide.
Today, doing business is all about communicating and content publishing – that too in multiple languages. To be able to efficiently communicate with your customers, employees, and business partners internationally, it is important for companies to translate their content into multiple languages.
Fall 2024 was irrefutably the season for Dan Da Dan fans. Not only was the Science Saru anime wowing folks every Thursday, its ongoing manga was showing out every Tuesday, giving fans of both reasons to wake up in the morning with a pep in their step at the beginning and end of their week.
Seeing as we’re still a way out from the anime’s second season and the manga is currently on hiatus, we decided to follow up on our interview with the anime’s director by chatting with Dandadan (the manga is spelled without spaces, unlike the show title’s stylization) manga translator Kumar Sivasubramanian to learn how its literary sausage is made for English-speaking sensibilities.
Isaiah Colbert, io9: In the manga translation industry, do translators have to audition or pitch themselves for series like Dandadan, or do publishers arbitrarily assign series to translators they work with?
Sivasubramanian: In my case, series have always been assigned to me by editors. I wouldn’t say it’s completely “arbitrary” though. If you have a past working relationship with that editor/publisher, then they might have an idea of your strengths or weaknesses, or even what kind of material you like to translate, and assign jobs accordingly. Also, I’m a freelancer, so they’re more “offers” than “assignments.” If I was offered, say, a baseball manga, I would probably say no, because I know nothing about baseball.
Translation is often perceived as a passive act, a mere transposing of meaning from one language to another. Yet, beneath this supposedly tranquil surface lies the tangled undergrowth of power, ethics, and professional tethers around every decision taken by the translator.
Conventional ethical frameworks note loyalty to clients and fidelity to the source text, but what happens when these principles conflict with a translator’s intellectual and moral agency?
In this discussion, Abderrahman Boukhaffa contests traditional notions of translation ethics, advocating for a self-care approach that empowers translators to navigate the industry on their own terms.
For Boukhaffa, translation is more than a mechanical act of transferring words from one language to another. It is an intellectual and ethical endeavor shaped by power configurations, professional constraints, and the translator’s agency.
Bryan Forrester, Co-founder and CEO of Boostlingo, returns to SlatorPod for round 2 to talk about the company’s growth, the US interpreting market, and the evolving role of AI.
Bryan explains how Boostlingo balances innovation with practicality, ensuring that new features align with customer needs. He highlights the company’s three-pronged strategy: retaining existing customers, enabling growth, and making long-term bets on emerging trends.
While tools like real-time captions and transcription enhance efficiency, Bryan stresses that AI alone cannot replace human interpreters in complex industries like healthcare. He highlights privacy, compliance, and the nuanced expertise of human interpreters as critical factors, positioning AI as a supportive tool rather than a replacement.
Despite advancements in AI speech translation, many so-called “real-time” systems may not be as real-time as they claim.
A new study finds that much of the research in simultaneous speech-to-text translation (SimulST) is based on unrealistic assumptions that do not reflect real-world conditions — potentially limiting the industry’s ability to deploy truly live, low-latency translation solutions.
In their December 24, 2024 paper, Sara Papi from Fondazione Bruno Kessler and Peter Polák, Ondřej Bojar, and Dominik Macháček from Charles University, reviewed 110 papers on SimulST and found that the majority focus on translating pre-segmented speech — where the input has been manually split into short utterances before translation — rather than continuous, unbounded speech streams.
The researchers argue that this “narrow focus” simplifies the problem by avoiding challenges such as latency, segmentation, and synchronization, ultimately hindering the development of systems that can work in real time without human intervention.
“Despite its intended application to unbounded speech, most research has focused on human pre-segmented speech, simplifying the task and overlooking significant challenges,” the researchers said.
Beware of scams and NEVER click on an unknown link.
From time to time members draw to our attention phishing and scamming emails naming the ITI and CIOL Directories. If you are worried about an email trust your instinct.
Check the company name – scammers use names that are real or similar to real companies, but it’s worth double checking for plausibility. If they say they work for a university or business but are using a gmail account for example, consider calling the organisation and ask to speak to the person who has emailed you. Always use contact details from a search engine and not from the email the scammer has sent you.
Is it just you? Ask your colleagues in any of the Networks you belong to as scammers often message multiple members in different languages pairs at the same time.
Fake emails – if they’re not from the company why not? Look out for gmail and odd endings on emails that don’t match web addresses.
Similar names or roles – passing a person off as someone who does exist.
Odd remuneration and ‘training periods’.
Flattery like “We have recently reviewed your impressive profile” or “your qualifications and experience seem to be an excellent fit for this role.” etc.
Too good to be true? Does the offer seem too good to be true? Then it probably is.
Citing ITI or CIOL as the source of the contact (‘…profile on ITI Directory etc.)
Poor English or English errors that are not credible given the purported country of origin/language pairs.
Promises that the full job description and additional details will be ‘provided during the interview’ so no actual information can be checked in advance.
There is a link, which is the REALLY dangerous part, allegedly to set up an ‘interview’ or register interest but which may draw down personal info and upload malware, etc.
Translators do so much more than translation – and we need the industry’s help.
Translators are the Clark Kent of the publishing industry. By day, they translate just as their name suggests. By night, they set out to save the world. Their work exceeds the name: the actual act of translating is only a part of what translators really do.
The stereotypical – and very misleading – idea of a translator might include someone who quietly collects a book, disappears to mysteriously convert it into another language and resurfaces only to deliver the now-translated book to a publisher. They are not seen or heard from again until the cycle repeats.
To test this stereotype, I conducted an informal survey. I asked around 80 respondents, people with an interest in world literature, to look through the following list of activities and, for each one, answer this question: “Who, in your opinion, is more likely to do this?” with the answer options being “translator” and “someone else”.
After uncovering a controversy in the captions of Russians at War, Rachel Ho digs into the art of translation
This is part of a new film column from Rachel Ho looking at Canadian cinema from a new point of view.
Debuting this column last month with an examination of the discourse around a film as complex and politically charged as Russians at War instigated a multitude of questions and opinions from readers, colleagues, and of course, from the interview subjects themselves. Those critical of the documentary labelled it an act of Russian propaganda, while its defenders levied accusations of knee-jerk censorship, declaring that the film deserved to be seen by audiences everywhere. But across all of the various issues I discussed with Anastasia Trofimova and Natalie Semotiuk, one point of contention raised a particular flag of interest with me.
In criticizing the film, Semotiuk asserted that derogatory slurs towards Ukrainians were used by Russian soldiers in the film and their translation into English via subtitling failed to encompass their pejorative nature. In response, Trofimova (the film’s director) stated her team had in fact provided a direct and literal translation of the words Semotiuk took issue with.
To be clear, I don’t seek in the slightest to re-litigate this specific issue; however, it did send me down a rabbit hole of thought regarding the power of translation, particularly in movies.
Back in the days of yore, language translation was a highly specialized profession, critical for coordinating diplomacy or international trade. The first bilingual dictionary book, Vocabularius ex quo, was a German-Latin set of words published in 1467, while clay tablets containing lists of works in Sumerian and Akkadian date back as early as 2300 B.C.
Language translation has become easier over the years in many cases thanks to the work of linguists and other anthropologists. The development of computers and eventually, artificial intelligence, has given a massive push to language translation, taking it out of the hands of specialists or weighty books and into our phones.
But how has translation applications like Google Translate developed over time, and what were their predecessors?
How Computer Translation Started
People have tried to use computers to translate languages since the mid-20th century.
“The idea of online translation was something that people strived for when computers began,” says Jaroslaw Kutylowski, the CEO of DeepL, a company that provides translation services using neural systems.
In fact, one of the first uses of computers for something beyond numbers was an experiment conducted in 1954 after several years of work by researchers at Georgetown University and IBM. The demonstration only translated around 250 words using six grammar rules — mostly brief statements in Russian about science, law and military affairs that were converted into English in a matter of seconds.
The scholar-translator says Kuvempu’s Bride in the Hills celebrates the sublimity in every person, especially women and Dalits.
Kuvempu (the popular name of poet, playwright, novelist, and critic Kuppalli Venkatappa Puttappa, 1904-1994) was a towering personality who profoundly influenced and shaped Kannada literature in the twentieth century. Through the corpus of his work, he scripted the development of modern Kannada society and became a cultural icon of Karnataka.
In a fitting tribute, scholar-translator Vanamala Viswanatha has translated his magnum opus, Malegalalli Madumagalu, into English as Bride in the Hills. Viswanatha is an accomplished translator from Kannada to English and has a vast repertoire that spans translations of several modern Kannada writers and translations of ancient and medieval Kannada classics. In an interview with Frontline, Viswanatha discusses the translation of this epic novel set in the Western Ghats in the late 19th century. Excerpts:
–For our non-Kannada readers, could you explain Kuvempu’s importance in Kannada literature and his impact on Karnataka’s society and culture?
V.V.: – Kuvempu, whose 120th birthday passed recently, is a household name in Karnataka. As a poet, playwright, novelist, and thinker, his writing represents the peak that Kannada literature had reached in the last century. Questioning the inhuman varna system, he offered a roadmap for the development of modern Kannada culture and society. With his formidable body of writing across all genres that reflects his progressive politics, Kuvempu has come to be seen as a phenomenon inalienably identified with the Kannada language and statehood. A poem he penned in 1928 (titled Jaya Bharatha Jananiya Tanujate) was chosen to be the State anthem of Karnataka in 2004. Inspired by Sri Ramakrishna, Vivekananda, Aurobindo, Gandhi, and Tagore, he sculpted a humanism rooted in spirituality. He transcended the crippling binds of identity, social, religious, and political, to offer an inclusive vision of a vishvamanava, a “universal human being”.
– Several noted Kannada literary critics consider Malegalalli Madumagalu one of the greatest Kannada novels ever written. What motivated you to translate this work?
V.V: – In recent years, the translation of Indian literary texts has grown into a powerful cultural practice that brilliantly reveals the different histories and cultures of the many Indias. Hence there is a lot of interest in and demand for translations. When I started looking for a good work to translate some four years ago, Kuvempu’s novel Malegalalli Madumagalu was on everyone’s list as an all-time Kannada classic. And yet it had not been translated until 2020, when the Kuvempu Pratishthana brought out the first translation. Kuvempu is not widely known outside Karnataka. So, when I approached Penguin, they were happy to publish the book in their Modern Classics series. Classics the world over are translated and re-translated, read and re-read. Kuvempu’s text has come to enjoy that status.
An ineffective translation might cost organizations much more than they think in a world where communication helps bridge the gap between different cultures. The effects can be devastating, regardless of whether the misinterpretation of a legal document, a badly localized marketing campaign, or a mistranslation in user manuals is involved. The harm to one’s reputation and relationships may be long-lasting, in addition to the financial losses inflicted. In this article, we will discuss the hidden expenses associated with inadequate translation and how one may avoid these problems by using appropriate preparation and the experience of professionals.
Lost Revenue from Miscommunication
When clients are unable to connect with a company, translations fail. The inability to properly translate product descriptions or advertising campaigns might result in misunderstanding, making prospective customers less likely to trust your company. When a worldwide e-commerce business markets its items in several languages, buyers might be misled about the characteristics or price of the product if the translation is erroneous. This could result in customers abandoning their purchases.
Invest in experienced translators who are knowledgeable about your sector to avoid problems like these. They guarantee that the language is accurate, provide detailed translation review services, and that your message is communicated correctly, hence preserving the integrity of your income streams.
International (MNN) — The work of Bible translators can often be both dangerous and isolating. However, Wycliffe Associates has found a technological breakthrough that addresses the need for safety and connection — Starlink.
“Starlink is a tool that essentially allows someone to have an internet connection via satellite, that is similar to having a hard wire connection,” explains Mark Roberts. “So, the speed, the reliability, the consistency, is really a breakthrough technology that gives a comparable service to the internet that you and I have in our home.” And, Starlink, a satellite internet service owned by SpaceX, is the latest tool in the toolbelt of Bible translation services.
How does it work?
First, Starlink enables teams to communicate securely with translators in remote or persecuted areas, providing mentorship, encouragement, and fellowship.
Artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly sophisticated, but will it ever replace humans? Experts predict it will affect some industries and some roles more than others. Learn what you need to know and what you can do to prepare yourself.
As organizations across all industries increasingly integrate artificial intelligence into workflows, the technology is driving fears about the job market and the future of work. Will AI replace humans? The only clear answer is “maybe.” Some jobs are more likely to experience AI disruption than others, with those consisting mainly of rote tasks more at risk. Some white collar jobs are already seeing AI integrated into their workflows, while jobs that require complex physical movements and human judgment—think plumbing or construction—are unlikely to be replaced by AI anytime soon. And jobs that require social and emotional skills, like teaching and social work, may never be. So, will artificial intelligence replace humans at work? No one can be sure, but here’s everything you need to know to form your own opinion.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Artificial intelligence will not replace humans for all jobs but it will change the way we work as more workers use AI tools to increase productivity. (Jump to Section)
Jobs most at risk of AI disruption and replacement are those consisting mainly of repetitive tasks, while jobs least at risk are those requiring social, emotional and interpersonal skills. (Jump to Section)
Many AI experts predict that AI will open up more job opportunities than it removes from the economy, and that the technology will be a net positive for job growth in the near future. (Jump to Section)
Will AI Replace Humans? Not All of Them
Like any new technology, artificial intelligence will cause job displacement in the near and distant future. According to a YouGov survey, 48 percent of working Americans believe that AI will decrease the number of jobs in their industry, a figure that has risen from 29 percent in March 2023. However, it’s unlikely the technology will replace all humans in the workforce. AI’s primary long-term effect on the labor market will probably be one of job change and creation, not elimination.
The language industry will remember 2024 as bringing an interesting mix of rapid-fire innovations and developments, with some clear trends emerging on the technology side, including translation as a feature (TaaF), multimodal AI adoption, retrieval augmented generation (RAG) applications, and large language model (LLM) customization.
The balance between human expertise and AI automation continued to feature prominently in discussions among industry experts, while companies of all sizes had their own takes. Reactions from readers, per weekly Slator polls, give a glimpse of sentiments and priorities across the industry.
1. Should Language Service Providers Rethink Their Offerings?
Despite the language service industry’s historical resilience, 2024 began with news of a few bankruptcies. The shift was evidence that not even a healthy amount of funding or the latest in AI technology can guarantee permanence, with Germany’s AI startup Lengoo filing for bankruptcy in March 2024, preceded by the DutchWCS Group in December 2023 (later on bought by Powerling).
The most voted on Slator Weekly poll revealed that over half (52.1%) of respondents believed that more language services provider (LSP) bankruptcies were inevitable in 2024. Just under a third (31.1%) thought more bankruptcies would probably follow, and a smaller group (13.4%) said it was possible. The smallest percentage (3.4%) of respondents thought future bankruptcies were unlikely.
As video games have grabbed the attention of the world audience by their unique gameplay and aesthetic graphics, they are inevitably rising. Game localization services are responsible for this increased number of games being played. It also explains that gamers are more in number and more audiences are interested in games. With game localization, it becomes easy for gamers to play games that are not even in their language. So there is another benefit to the gaming industry in the form of translation and localization.
It is the rising demand for games that makes one phenomenon “remake games” quite popular. Well, there are mixed opinions on this gaming concept; some support it while some are against it.
What are Remake Games?
The name “remake” suggests that we are recreating something that has already been made. In the gaming world, it means recreating games in such a way that the main storyline and characters are retained in it. Hence, new plots and characters are added to the original version of the game to make it a new version. New graphics and modern mechanics are added in the game that not only retain the previous audience of the game but also attract new ones. These remake games are a great strategy to create a nostalgic experience for old gamers and present them with the same game on beautifully wrapped gift paper.
New graphics are made on the basis of the original ones
New objectives and goals are added for the main characters
Main plot of the game is altered
UX/UI design is changed and new locations are added to the game
The number of audiences that play video games is a lot of Gen Z and Gen Alpha. These remake games target Gen Z and Gen Alpha. In these remake games, one of the most important tools to use is the game localization services that adapt these games both linguistically and culturally for the target audiences. They are the reasons Silent Hill 2 is an award-winning game today.
Some of the remake games of 2024 that hit globally are:
Silent Hill 2
The Last of Us Part II
Tomb Raider I-III Remastered
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth
Star Wars Battlefront Classic Collection
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Arcade: Wrath of the Mutants
However, with the rise of large language models (LLMs), researchers are questioning whether these advanced AI tools can meet the complex demands of legal translation.
In their recent study, Applying Large Language Models in Legal Translation, Martina Bajčić, Associate Professor at the University of Rijeka, and Dejana Golenko, Assistant Professor at the same university, acknowledge the significant impact of LLMs on translation but stress that “the potential of LLMs in relation to specialized translation such as legal translation needs to be comprehensively examined.”
Through an analysis of papers published from 2021 to 2024, Bajčić and Golenko found that research on LLMs in legal translation remains scarce. “To date, there has been scarce research on its application in the field of legal translation,” they observed, highlighting the disparity between the widespread enthusiasm for generative AI and the lack of studies focusing on its application in specialized domains.
As the first half of the 2020s comes to a close, one global literary trend shows no signs of abating: a hunger for the stories of Japanese writers. The past five years saw authors from Japan win prestigious literary prizes at home and abroad, while a growing interest in translated East Asian literature contributed to an uptick in the number of Japanese novels translated into English.
Over the past year, for example, Asako Yuzuki’s “Butter,” a thriller inspired by a real-life femme fatale and translated by Polly Barton, was named the Waterstones Book of the Year. Meanwhile, Haruki Murakami — who retains his own center of gravity in the literary landscape, perennially drawing Nobel speculation but no prize as of yet — saw two new releases arrive in 2024 with the publication of “The City and Its Uncertain Walls,” translated by Philip Gabriel, and “End of the World and Hard-Boiled Wonderland,” translated by Jay Rubin. The former is a translation of the author’s latest novel after a six-year hiatus, while the latter revisits Murakami’s earlier work, “Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World” (1991), previously translated by Alfred Birnbaum. Both titles tread familiar territory in fantastical worlds, iterating on previous works or themes from Murakami’s extensive oeuvre — a kind of literary deja vu that satisfies die-hard fans but hasn’t won over all critics.
Readers’ tastes, however, have not been restricted to scintillating crime stories or literary titans, and the thematic preoccupations of Japanese authors have ranged from the deadly serious and melancholic to the weird, the uncategorizable and the notably softer, fluffier works of the iyashi-kei (healing type) persuasion. Feline-focused fiction by the likes of Syou Ishida and Kiyoshi Shigematsu, translated by E. Madison Shimoda (“We’ll Prescribe You a Cat”) and Jesse Kirkwood (“The Blanket Cats”), are among this year’s releases, as well as the memoir “Mornings With My Cat Mii” by Mayumi Inaba, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori.
Pressure from the C-suite to adopt AI in business processes has become well-known, and widespread, since OpenAI’s ChatGPT burst onto the scene in November 2022.
Nearly two years later, it seems clear that the language industry, too, has noticed curiosity from clients at high levels.
Of course, interest in AI is not limited to LSP clients; many LSPs have long been exploring if, and how, to integrate AI into their workflows.
This is reflected in respondents’ choice of “AI and big data” as the number one skill they want to see in their employees over the next three years.
126 respondents selected between one and three of the top skills employees now need in the industry. AI and big data, named by 40% of participants, was the most-cited answer, up from second place in 2023.
In 2024, that honor went to “creative thinking,” identified by 28% of companies as a must-have. “Service orientation and customer service” was close behind; having topped the list in 2023, 26% of respondents listed it in 2024.
Haruki Murakami’s most recent novel, The City and its Uncertain Walls, revolves around two parallel stories, one focusing on a 17-year-old boy, the other on a 45-year-old man. Readers of the translated English version will gradually become aware of the two worlds, as each first-person narrator establishes his respective setting within the novel. For readers of the original Japanese, the parallel is, however, immediate from the first pages of chapter five.
In the original Japanese text of The City and its Uncertain Walls, when the first-person narrator shifts from using boku to using watashi, it suggests a clear handover from one narrator (that of the boy’s story) to another (of the man’s story). The change is both visual (written differently) and audial (pronounced differently), and so becomes a simple anchor of recognition for each of the two worlds. Due to the lack of possibilities in English, both words are translated as “I”.
Unlike many other languages, Japanese has several expressions for the first-person pronoun “I”. In addition to boku and watashi used by the younger and older narrators in The City and its Uncertain Walls, “I” can for example be expressed as watakushi, ore, atashi, uchi or washi. Speakers and writers of Japanese have, therefore, a range of choices when referring to the self.
Each of the Japanese pronouns is loaded with meaning, suggesting gender, age, rank or relationships between people (among other things). So, as in Murakami’s novels, the possibility of using various pronouns to refer to oneself can therefore become an expression of creativity.
The Language Shop is currently the quality assurance provider of court interpreting assignments fulfilled by thebigword. The language service provider (LSP) carries out ‘mystery shops’ of 1% of all UK court interpreting bookings, amounting to approximately 2,000 assessments per year across both telephone and face-to-face interpreting assignments.
Lingard told the public audience that the LSP has “no plans to use AI” to deliver quality assurance “any time soon”.
Lord Willis of Knaresborough responded, “I find that very disappointing, to be honest, because we are clearly in a situation where AI and other technologies — not just AI — will play an ever more significant role in maintaining quality services.”
“If you are not doing anything at the moment to introduce that, either by training people or within the operation, then that is a big issue that we should address to the Government,” he added.
“It is just language. The consequences are not as dire as they would be in the health service,” — Lord Porter of Spalding
Lord Porter of Spalding agreed: “There seems to be a reticence to go anywhere near this, on the basis that this particular service is so important. But the health service is starting to use it and there is no more important service from a user’s perspective than the health service.”
The translation news daily digest is my daily 'signal' to stop work and find out what's going on in the world of translation before heading back into the world at large! It provides a great overview that I could never get on my own.
susan rose (X)
United States
ProZ.com Translation News daily digest is an e-mail I always look forward to receiving and enjoy reading!
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