Over the years
there have been many exuberant predictions of change that would fundamentally
alter the localization business. However, most of these dreams of the industry have never
come to pass.
Trends that never arrived: Translation is no longer a
commodity
This is the idea that translation will drift away from the
“per word” model and be seen more as a service that requires skilled project
managers and other technicians to deliver. This idea has mainly been promoted
by salesmen and the owners of small MLVs who saw themselves being compared to emerging
Chinese and Indian vendors offering cut rates on per word pricing.
Of course, the opposite has happened. Translation is more
commoditized than ever with an attempt to eliminate translators entirely in
favor of systems that auto-translate. While such “solutions” are far from
mature and probably will never fully replace the nuanced work of human
translators, it cannot be denied that the per-word rate continues to dominate
with prices at or below what they were a decade ago.
NEXT: Trends that never arrived: An industry leader (a “Microsoft
of translation”) will emerge with several companies growing by buying up
mid-sized players
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