Busting the Misconceptions: 8 Truths about Translation

1. The Language Services Market is not Small

Although it may be comparatively small, the language services market is in fact a sizable and a fast-growing one. It is estimated the market will reach the 37 billion USD mark by 2018, at an annual growth rate of 4.7%. At this point, there are hundreds of thousands of translation companies and freelancers offering their services, and the most sought-after one is written translations, followed by simultaneous and consecutive interpreting and software localization.

2. Professional Human Translation Costs Always Pay Off

The ability to use and understand a foreign language is not necessarily the same as knowing how to translate properly. The price of a bad, awkward or inaccurate translation is too steep, making the price of a good, professional human translation the long run reasonable and low.

3. Translation Market Trends Reflects Industry Development

An expanding industry will require more language services. At this point and as far as we can see, IT and life sciences are the two hottest topics in translation industry, the reason being these are the two fastest-growing industries.

4. Machine Translation is Never Good Enough

Sometimes it really is – an online tool may help you get the context of a foreign language text. But if we are talking about the professional translation requirements, about a product/service localization for a foreign market, then it is, to put it mildly – less than perfect and requires post editing services of professional human translators.

5. CAT is not MT

CAT (Computer Assisted Translation) and machine translation are quite different things – CAT is done by human translators using a specific software, machine translation is done by computers alone.

6. Translation is not mostly about Words

Translating word-for-word will never yield a good result. Translation is not about translating strings of words, but it is a far more sophisticated process of communicating the meanings, tones, contexts, intents and emotions between cultures and languages.

7. Translation is not Easy

We honestly wish it was. It is more often than not a very hard work involving a good deal of creativity, team work and patience in addition to linguistic and/or expert proficiency. Communicating the meaning and tone from one language to another accurately and meaningfully is rarely an easy task.

8. Quality of Translation Depends on the Quality of Source Material

Simply put – if a translator does not understand the source material, the result will be a poor translation. When good and experienced translators do not understand the source material, the problem is not about their source language proficiency, but about the quality of the source texts.