Top Translation Industry Trends for 2020-by Ofer Tirosh

Towards the end of every year, the Tomedes team sits down to think about the future. We use our translation industry expertise and the business trends that we’ve seen over the course of the past year to map out what’s likely to trend in the year ahead. 

For 2019’s translation trends we flagged up internal digitization, external outreach and technological advancement. While we fully expect those trends to continue into 2020 and beyond, we thought it was time to flag up a few additional top translation industry trends that we believe will be important in 2020. Read on to discover more! 

Trend One: Post-editing Machine Translation

We expect post-editing of machine translations (PEMT) to be a top trend in the translation world in 2020. Not only is machine translation an attractive option for many businesses (due to its speed and cost), but there is growing evidence to suggest that turning to translation by a machine, then improving the result with a PEMT service is faster (and therefore more cost effective) than translating from scratch. In 2020, we’ll see the translation industry respond to this in force. 

Let’s look at some numbers. A study by the University of Groningen (Netherlands) and Dublin City University (Ireland) looked at three methods of translation of a chapter of the popular novel, Warbreaker:

• Translation from scratch

• Post-editing of phrase-based statistical machine translation

• Post-editing of neural machine translation

The study found that post-editing of phrase-based statistical machine translation resulted in 18% greater translation productivity, while post-editing of neural machine translation resulted in 36% higher productivity than translating from scratch. 

Furthermore, both of the methods including machine translation saw the translators take fewer breaks during their work (29% for post-editing of phrase-based statistical machine translation and 42% for post-editing of neural machine translation). The breaks they did take, however, lasted longer than they did when translating from scratch, at 14% for phrase-based and 25% neural machine translation. 

The figures will add further weight to the trend for businesses to try combining machine translation with post-editing services in 2020. Even though translations produced by machines aren’t perfect, technology has advanced sufficiently to mean that it’s often faster to use a machine AND a human than to rely on human translation alone. 

You can find the rest clicking here.