tcwordl | 6 / 2008 | Page 14

How can companies prepare themselves for the changing market?

The translation market in ten years’ time - a forecast

by Astrid Hager

The need for translation services will increase due to the enlargement of the European Union, says our author. To cope with the rising number of documents to translate companies need software like CAT tools.

The analysts agree: the volume of documents for translation will increase within the next ten years, even if opinions differ as to the extent to which this will happen. The language variety created by the expansion of the EU, for example, not only leads to a larger translation volume within the European institutions like the translation of minutes from meetings or legal drafts. It also increases the demand for translations at commercial firms and manufacturing companies, as the EU dictates that all technical documents are to be translated into the national languages (RL 79/112/EWG).

Globalization and the associated growth will provide the GILT sectors (Globalization, Internationalization, Localization and Translation) with an enormous boom. The European Union of Associations of Translations Companies (EUATC) assumes that the translation market will observe an annual growth of approximately five percent during the next few years.

Irrespective of the use of the English language as lingua franca, a further development is also becoming apparent – the protection of cultures and languages. The translation market will without a doubt profit from this tendency. In addition, the growing recognition of an ever more multilingual population in the US and elsewhere will further increase the demand for language services.

Apart from these developments, technological innovations and a continuously increasing product portfolio require a better quality of translations as well as more flexible translators and translation agencies.

Preparing for the lack of translators
The rising demand for translations in the near future is intensified by an existing lack of translators for numerous specialized fields and particular language combinations. International companies making use of translation services must therefore be ready to adjust to these developments or take adequate measures to avoid any shortages. Within the scope of its strategic alignment for the future, a company should first determine which texts will require translation within the next five to ten years and which languages are required.

Some written material like advertising texts, presentations or even operating instructions for globally sold products are already only distributed in English, if the legislation permits it. This is due to the fact that today recipients and consumers worldwide have an improved knowledge of the English language. English will continue to assert itself as the common language in science and internal corporate communications.

However, a well-considered selection of texts intended for translation will by itself not be sufficient to successfully face the expected lack of translators.

With languages spoken only by a relatively small population like e.g. Estonian, it will be rather difficult to counter the lack of translators, as the number of people who call this their native language will probably not increase at an explosive rate. Supporting better and more consistent training opportunities for translators, is one way to help bridging the gap. Translators and translation agencies offering language training are strongly dependent on the support of companies with their practical orientation and concrete product materials.

Also, companies buying translation services will be required to display a higher degree of transparency towards the translators in the future. This will enable translators to gain an overview of the processes and the corporate language. Companies should regard translation services as an investment and not merely as costs.

A further option for countering the lack of translators is outsourcing. For example, numerous translations into English are produced in India today. However – even if we are mostly satisfied with the quality of these translations – we should question if cultural specifics, for example from the American cultural area, could be accommodated in translations done offshore. Furthermore, outsourcing is mainly an option for translations into English.

In light of the rapid increase of language combinations required for translation and the ever-shorter delivery deadlines, professional project and quality management will become more significant in future. With the use of the latest technologies, translations will be performed directly in the client’s CMS system. Translation agencies could directly adopt a part of project management tasks, which currently are performed by the companies. This will probably decrease the cooperation between companies and freelancers, and increase the cooperation with translation agencies, as only the latter can bring in the technological and organizational requirements for major projects. In the future, it will therefore be decisive for companies to work with a translation agency that is able to cover the broadest possible language and technology spectrum.

Technological developments
Many companies may be concerned with regard to the increasing volume of translations and documents for translations, but the large amount could also be regarded as an advantage. A high number of repetitive text blocks will result from the large quantities of translations. It will therefore become increasingly significant to prepare documentation in such a way, that existing text elements are available not only for further documentation but also for translations and thus do not require repetitive translations. An efficient Data Management System (DMS) and Content Management System (CMS) are the basic prerequisites to enable cost-saving and terminologically consistent translations. This is the only way to fulfill the growing demand for quality in the future.

The application of CAT tools will become imperative to create terminology databases, glossaries and the like. Although terminology management may initially seem an enormous time-consuming effort, the advantages for both translators and companies are obvious: While translators are able to manage a higher translation volume faster and with less effort, the client gains more control over the quality of the translation into a language of which he usually has no command.

The CAT tool market has changed rapidly over the last years. A few large providers are now dominating the market. Does this give rise to the assumption that companies will have to decide on a CAT tool from a large manufacturer to ensure that it will still be used in ten years’ time?

Many forecast that the few larger providers such as SDL, software manufacturer of the leading software SDLX-Trados, will have to face competition from smaller companies such as Alchemy, MultiCorpora and Lingotek in the next few years. Recent software developments provide good alternatives to the established programs, some of which exist on account of their high technological standards. Thanks to the spread of standards for projects (TTX, XLIFF), Translation Memories (TMX) or dictionaries (TBX), the choice of a translation program is less significant today than it used to be. XML went through a similar development several years ago. The program used to process XML files no longer plays a crucial role.

When choosing a CAT tool, companies should therefore place more emphasis on their specific demands regarding the functionality of the tool and less on whether its compatibility.

Common terminology pools
To ensure terminological consistency and to simplify terminology work companies are now making their translation databases accessible to other companies. Skrivanek, together with 42 other leading companies, recently founded the so-called TAUS Data Association (TDA), which enables its members to share translation files. All members load their language combinations onto a server in the form of Translation Memories or multilingual glossaries and can in return download the language pairs of other members. This creates an immense volume of linguistic data. 

Machine translation
Another solution for managing the growing translation volume is the further development of machine translations (MT). MT, developed and used since the late 1940s, suffers from a rather doubtful reputation: The often fragmentary translation attempts by some freeware tools available on the internet are all too often devoid of any meaning and may only bring tears of laughter to our eyes. However, large companies such as IBM, Sun, SAP etc. are already achieving considerable results with more sophisticated MTs, which - of course - only become printable after human post-editing.

We basically distinguish between two types of MTs: rule-based systems and statistical systems. The latter use predominantly word alignment techniques to receive matching pairs. The basic requirement for statistical systems is the availability of a sufficient volume of bilingual documents.

Large companies are especially predestined for statistical translation systems due to the enormous data volumes in different language pairs and the documents’ often purely technical, simplified style.

The common platform TDA can also contribute significantly to improve statistical translation systems, as it is able to deliver the enormous volume of topic related text with which the developed MT system is "fed".

The rule-based systems are generally based on bilingual word lists and language transfer rules. The basic components with which these systems work are words and rules on their combinability to sentences, sections and entire texts. Every document to be translated must therefore be dissected into words, figures and punctuation.

Many machine translation systems, however, fail in rebuilding the target language structure due to the strongly varying syntax and grammar between source and target language.

The so-called “controlled language” could solve these obstacles. The main characteristics of "controlled language" are simplified grammar with repetitive, recognizable structures and a vocabulary, which only contains a fraction of the words from the entire vocabulary. Language providers are already developing regulations to achieve significantly better results in MTs.  

Anyhow, we would advise companies, who will not work with MT in the near future, to still collect information today on how data, texts and documents could be prepared in such a way as to enable rapid processing from the MT technology at some stage.
Even in the future the human being will still be required as the controlling instance. With regard to MT, the task of a translator will comprise far more post-editing. Specially trained post-editors are already working with MT, their work differing fundamentally from pure translation or editing. This, however, can only be successful if it is approved and recognized by all sides, not only by the translators but also by the clients.

	This article was published in tcworld, magazine for international information management. To receive a free subscription click here!

Astrid Hager is account manager at Skrivanek Berlin GmbH.
Contact: astrid.hager@skrivanek-gmbh.de