Doomsday for professional translation: I doubt it. Should you?

One of the leading technologists in the industry Marco Trombetti expects the market for professional translations to shrink, I believe he anticipates the impact of machine translation (MT), and with a good reason. MT has arrived. Earlier this week a huge German consultancy company contacted us at Nimdzi, they are investigating the impact of machine translation on language service pricing for a very wealthy and a very cautious client. Today, a friend wrote to me from a TAUS conference in London with a bit of a panic in his tone: the revenues are falling, the robots are coming.

Indeed.

When a company switches from professional translation to editing machine translation to make it good enough, they drop the price per word 15-50% and lose even more revenue to parts of the text that MT translates perfectly, like numbers, country names, and addresses. The invoiced volume gets slashed even if the profit margins stay healthy. This year MT becomes as widespread as translation memory, and the critical mass of companies adopt it. It's easy to start fearing that the translation revenues would shrink on a global scale, leading to negative industry growth, layoffs and disappointment. That's the Translation Doomsday Scenario.

I doubt it will ever happen in the foreseeable future. Here is why.

1. High reported growth

First, all the data we've collected so far points to growth in translation. There is a 10.8% organic increase in the hundred largest LSPs in the world. The recent US study with the ALC shows a 12% growth in sales in mid-sized American companies. 11-12% is a really high growth rate for an established market. Video games grow at 9-10%, and everyone plays video games (or at least their mothers do — they spend their twilight years in Candy Crush).

Behind the organic growth figure, there are many services that move at different speeds, from translation and desktop publishing to multilingual SEO and chatbot training. Still, translation is by far the largest activity.

2. Lower prices > more demand

Second, there is the Jevons Paradox. Jevons was a 19-century economist who discovered that as the coal prices decreased, that led to higher coal consumption during the Industrial Revolution and a boom in coal mining rather than a decline. For us, the lesson is that as the prices for professional translations decrease, the demand might spike.

As services become more affordable to buyers, they will order more words in more languages. Microsoft translates into 100+ languages, SAP in 20-40 languages, most localized videogames see versions in 8 languages. If translation becomes less expensive, localization managers will simply reinvest their budgets into more languages, i.e. this will benefit Central European, Nordic and South-East Asian markets. No one in their right mind will go to their superior in the buyer organization and say "I don't need half of my budget anymore, because we just machine translate".

3. More content than ever

Third, there is more content than ever before: more patents, clinical trials, films and TV series, more applications and videogames per year, more packaged products in brick and mortar stores and more items in stock online. Even if the prices per unit go down 50%, there are far too many projects that need a translation.

4. LSPs are like water

My fourth and the last reason to doubt the doomsday is a strong belief in the spirit of entrepreneurship. Most LSPs are run by smart and energetic people who work in close contact with buyers. As the ground shifts under their feet, entrepreneurs adapt faster than anyone else: faster than the translators, faster than the clients. They diversify into new services and create new markets for cash-cow services. Who knew about eDiscovery ten years ago? Today, the leading LSPs make millions in eDiscovery and enable even more translation work through this service.

Who knows what they will invent next!