Asia Online – the world’s most significant literacy project (and internet investment opportunity)

The forecast for the machine translation services market

Whichever way the machine translation market is measured, its prospects are enormous. Asia Online provided us with this slide at the beginning of our discussions, which continued through the period where SMT competitor Language Weaver released its estimates of the size of the untapped translation marketplace.

The size of the human translation market today is estimated at US$14 billion according to research and consulting firm Common Sense Advisory. Because of the dramatically lower costs that automated translation technology enables, Language Weaver estimates that untapped markets for digital translation total more than US$67.5 billion.

Asia Online’s slide shows the current Global Translation Market based on Common Sense Advisory figures with adjustments based on quality improvement. The solid line data in the slide is based on Common Sense Advisory, while the dashed line data is Asia Online projections. The human translation market is currently US$14 billion with US$65 million digital, so getting up to US$67 billion of digital any time soon seems rather optimistic.

Both Language Weaver and Asia Online have different projections, but both agree that existing forecasts do not take into account new content that simply cannot be translated because of current technology limitations, and manpower, time and cost limitations.

Wiggins estimates that only 5% of what needs to be translated is currently being translated due to these factors. But while there is much that could be translated, there is still a cost associated with translation, and it must be paid for by someone. As costs lower and technology improves new content will quickly start to be translated and expand the market overall.

“Probably the most important point to make about the language translation market is the massive latent demand. This is clearly a market that is begging for a technology to help, not a technology begging for a market, which is so often the case in the internet industry.

So should human translators feel threatened by the latest development in machine translation? Not at all says Wiggins, “our model is to support the languages services industry, not to compete with them.”

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