You will probably recall the historical vision of the “paperless office” where the introduction of personal computers would eliminate paper? Of course, the opposite happened with computer printers consuming more paper than ever before.  I believe this is analogous to machine translation. If today, as a consumer in an increasingly global market, you cannot read some content because it is not in your native language, then having a machine translation is better than no translation at all. The machine translation helps you to get an idea (or “gist”) of the content, and therefore if it is of real interest. If it is of real interest a higher quality translation is needed and you have to source that from somewhere. So like printers created greater demand for paper, machine translation will generate greater demand for human translation.

So machine translation opens up a whole new world of content to new audiences not addressed by traditional translation because there simply are not enough translators or translation budgets to translate all the content that is available. Perhaps the difference is future translation will be demand driven with consumers determining which content needs to be translated rather than what organizations think their customers want.

Another key factor, of course, is that the market for translation and localization continues to grow. According to research by Common Sense Advisory, WinterGreen Research and others it is expected to be worth at least $20bn by 2015, double the $10bn of today. Read full article.

See: SDL Blog

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