Stargazing, pulling tarot cards, reading coffee grounds and interpreting palm lines are just some of the many ways in which human beings have tried to decipher the secrets of the future and win the race against the natural passage of time. This is partly due to an innate need to get ahead of events, either out of curiosity to see what the future holds for us or to have the chance to know it in advance so that we can decide on how to act next. During prehistory, human beings wanted to find out whether the season’s harvest was going to be prosperous; while in the Middle Ages, kings wanted to feel confident that they would emerge victorious from a war or even that their lineage could continue to extend through a male child. Although it’s true that in more modern times the esoteric world gradually gave way to the world of science and reasoning, divination and an interest in knowing the future have endured in different cultures along with different practices of clairvoyance, which are implemented to a greater or lesser extent based on the popularity and capacity for success that is attributed to it at the local level. And, of course, the same thing happens today! Are there not horoscopes, controversial calls to fortune tellers and personal guidance through all kinds of superstitions and traditionally inherited beliefs? The future awakens an innate and constant curiosity in humans.
For this reason, we have asked ourselves about the future of the language services industry. If we take a look at the past, we will see that the translation profession has changed significantly in recent decades, let alone the last few centuries! We have been experiencing a paradigm shift for some time now, moving from a focus on textual literal content to a focus on expressing contextual content at the communicative level. Likewise, in recent decades, digitalization has revolutionized work processes and globalization has transformed the way we communicate with colleagues, with clients and, of course, for informational purposes. Therefore, one might wonder what direction the sector is going to take from here on out. When we think about the future of translation, do we imagine a shrinking human workforce? Do we see translation integrated into each and every aspect of our daily life? Do we think that language barriers will disappear at some point? Is translation a profession destined to disappear or to transform into a new type of service with new objectives and new procedures?
In today’s article, we examine some of the expected trends for the short- and medium-term future to thus encourage discussion about said horizons.
To begin with, it is clear that machine translation has a tremendous role in the daily operations of this professional activity. Used correctly, this resource can significantly speed up translation processes, reduce costs and immediately overcome language barriers in cases where a highly accurate translation is not required, but rather an informative overview is sufficient. However, experience tells us that this modality is still not applicable to certain areas of translation. This is because there are texts that do not require an exact translation of the textual content, but rather a creative reformulation that brings the texts closer to the target audiences and elicits an effective response similar to the original. Therefore, it seems that the industry of advertising, literary content and brand management will not turn to this resource any time soon, and it will continue to rely on the services provided by human professionals, who will surely specialize in tasks such as transcreation and language consulting between markets (for example, for the launch of a product or a brand abroad).
In the same vein, there is no doubt that the future of translation involves the consolidation of artificial intelligence in localization processes. Although the corpora of matches previously had a lower success rate, AI-powered translation engines have improved considerably in recent years and are regularly used by translation agencies. Although these engines work better with common language combinations, an optimization towards less frequent language pairs that bring this resource closer to other markets that require language services in minority languages or, at least, languages with a lower demand, is expected. Thus, there will be an increase in professionals who are dedicated to improving these engines and optimizing their results through post-editing.
Moreover, everything seems to indicate that the use of desktop translation programs will gradually decline and more work will be done with online tools, since cloud storage and file sharing with this technology will offer better advantages, such as greater accessibility to documents, greater security and the reduced risk of accidentally losing data. Paradoxically, we are once again finding the future in the sky thanks to cloud-based technology.
In addition, it seems that other more avant-garde translation technologies are being drawn up and established on the horizon, which will revolutionize the way in which we relate to the environment. One of them is voice translation, which will allow us to speak to a device that will orally translate this content for our interlocutor. That being said, only time will tell if it can reliably reproduce language puns, wordplays and the paralinguistic meanings that stem from typical intonation.
The future of translation is very promising, but there is still a long way to go until we are able to efficiently break down language barriers.
