The original report Rise of the Machines - The State of Machine Translation was published on January 22, 2018. This is a 2022 update to the report brought to you by Nimdzi's MT Specialist Özge Ünlü.
Introduction
It’s already been six years now since Google revealed that Google Translate processes 146 billion words a day — three times more than what all the professional translators in the world combined can do in a month. That was 2016 and things haven’t really slowed down in the machine translation (MT) universe since.
The doomsday scenario silently crept up upon us without anyone really noticing, with robots having already surpassed humans in terms of translation speed. Contrary to popular expectations, however, this has not killed jobs in our industry. Revenues of companies in the language services continue to increase every year, and the demand for quality linguists is at a record high. Machine translation in its raw form is still no match for human translation, and human professional translations are still the answer for projects that require a certain level of quality.
However, that doesn’t mean translation is unaffected by MT or that professional service providers can afford to ignore MT (spoiler: they really can’t if they want to remain relevant). Indeed, with MT post-editing being commonly performed for most types of content, and raw MT being used for things like user-generated content, it’s becoming more and more urgent for translation companies and global brands to understand and harness the power of machine translation.
Let’s put old fears to bed: MT technology is not replacing translators. Rather, translators who are adapting to the use of MT technology are getting a head start on those who don’t.
This has been a preview. The full State of Machine Translation report can be accessed online by Nimdzi Partners.
The updated report has been researched and written by Nimdzi's MT Specialist Özge Ünlü. If you wish to learn more about what is in this report, reach out to Özge at [email protected].
