Riding the Language Technology Hype Wave

Simultaneously the smallest continent and one of the largest countries in the world, Australia is a country like no other, as is its language services industry. On the one hand, Australia has one of the highest proportions of immigrants in the world, with more than a quarter of all Australians having been born overseas.

Since ChatGPT’s launch in November 2022, media outlets have been churning out article after article about how generative artificial intelligence (AI) is coming for our jobs. Nearly every week, a new piece comes out in publications like The Atlantic or Business Insider about how ChatGPT will “destabilize” the job market, making certain workers redundant.

oday, machine translation (MT) is so pervasive that — for many young or early-career localization professionals, at least — it’s hard to imagine a time without it. But such a time did exist. Those with a decade or two of language industry experience under their belt have, no doubt, witnessed firsthand MT’s evolution into the nearly omnipresent entity that it is today.

The language services industry is a shadow industry that is driving the growth of all global brands. It is a transformation business that does not create anything from scratch but transforms content from all other industries.