The language industry is the sector of activity dedicated to designing, producing, and marketing tools, products, or services related to computerized language processing.[1] It is a part of the information technology industry, but also draws upon the fields of linguistics, lexicography, software engineering, artificial intelligence, and interface design.[2]
Contents |
The scope of services in the industry includes:
Translation as an activity exists at least since mankind started developing trade millennia ago; so, if we include interpreting, it is no exaggeration to say that the origins of language industry are older than those of written language.
Modern language industry has developed rapidly following availability of the internet. Achievements of the industry include the ability to quickly translate long texts into many languages. This has created new challenges as compared with the traditional activity of translators, such as that of quality assurance. There are some quality standards such as EN 15038 in Europe and ASTM F2575-06 in the USA.[3]
There are language industry companies of different sizes; none of them is dominant in the world market so far.[4]
There are human resources in translation of very different levels; internet has gathered professional translators, students, language teachers and professionals from other disciplines, all of them offering translation services.
It is extremely easy to offer translation services online. All one needs is a website and access to a translator database, which has created an insurgence of new small translation agencies all over the world. This, in turn, has made it very difficult to buy translation services as all these tens of thousands of translation agencies offer a practically identical service offering.[5] All one has to do is search for translation companies online to see how similar these different options actually are. To drill down to the language and industry expertise that are needed, consumers and business users alike can use tools like Translizer to do a precision search based on competencies rather than just "translation". This development has made it much easier to avoid the common pitfalls of buying translations.[6]
One field of research in the industry includes the possibility of machine translation fully replacing human translation.[7]
Rates for translation services are a big discussion topic nowadays,[8] as several translation outsourcers are said to go in search of cheap labor. Professional associations like IAPTI try to put a stop to this development.[9] Currency fluctuation is yet another important factor.[10]
Apart from this, phenomenons such as crowdsourcing are seen in big-scale translations,[11] which has drawn criticism[12] from the American Translators Association.[13]
US President Barack Obama drew criticism after calling for automatic translation.[14][15]