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: All translation will be done
online, for free
This is Wikipedia-style translation, done “in the cloud” by
volunteers—either for free or with micropayments. This is really the holy grail
in the industry. It is the dream that translators can be removed from
translation process while still charging clients nearly the same rates. This is
the driving of profits through increased margins.
Online translation platforms are already boasting huge savings
and professional levels of translation work and service by tens of thousands of
“linguists.”
This concept suffers from a misunderstanding of the most
basic tenants of the art of translation—that not everyone who speaks two
languages is naturally a translator. The idea that every person with English as
a second language can log on and competently complete translation work (or edit
MT) is wishful thinking. Just because a person is reasonably competent in a
second language does not mean they have the knowledge, dedication, skill and
ear for the language to handle translation.
It is also hard also to understand why proponents of such a
system would believe that casual contributors to the process would ever take
the work seriously, respect deadlines, or bother to make themselves available
to cover the client queries--let alone the inevitable client complaints.
NEXT: Trends that never arrived: All translation will just
be editing of machine translation
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