By Nikhil Kansal

Transcribed in July 2018 during the author's Modlingua internship, from Ravi Kumar's Modlingua Live talk on the future of language jobs (segment 09:10 to 20:00).

Source video: 5 Ways to Become a Translatorpreneur: Translator Career in the Age of AI - Modlingua Live

Machine tools and the translator

So what I will do now, I will try and include the impact of these machine tools and IT on translators, and then move ahead to other topics of today's discussion. What we understand is that technologies are now essential even for translators. There has been tremendous improvement in the machine translation tool output of Google Translate that we always notice. Similarly, this particular trend involves creating domain-specific, quality-controlled multilingual corpora in order to increase machine tools' efficiency - that means there is opportunity for a person who is multilingual and who is smart enough in a particular domain.

Mantra in the Indian Parliament

However, if we talk about the development of machine tools in terms of the Indian market, we notice the name of Dr. Hemant Darbari, who devised a system called Mantra, which is now being deployed in the Parliament of India, where translators translate documents on a regular basis - all those proceedings that take place during parliament - and they are using this tool very efficiently in order to increase their translation output, especially when there is workload during the parliament session when it is on.

More content than translators

So now, what happens because of all this impact that is coming into the picture? We find ourselves a little bit in the danger zone, because we start thinking that with machines coming into the picture they are replacing human beings and translators during the process. But the reality is, because of the Google phenomena or social media phenomena or web technology phenomena, there has been a tremendous increase in the consumption pattern of text, not only in English but in all major countries of the world. When I say major countries, that means they have their specific languages; therefore, there is an increase in multilingual content globally, and that increase is exponential. It is very difficult to measure that increase, but I assume it is at least 100 times in the recent 10 years.

However, comparatively, the number of translators in all these languages has not increased in the same proportion. There are experts who say that although we are there as translators, only 0.5% of the content gets translated and the rest, 99.5%, remains untranslated. Number two, not everybody is online. So on one side there is opportunity because 99.5% of documents are never translated, and on the other side, not everybody is in the digital arena; those who are not on the internet cannot use machine tools. Therefore, we have to improvise the course for all those populations and people who are digitally deprived. And if you try and understand globally the presence of translators, it is very, I will say, a minimal number of translators available globally. When I say translator, I always refer to the professional translators. While interacting with a variety of leaders of the industry on the translation market as well as translation associations, I came across certain points which I always discuss with them, and I came to the conclusion that we would not have more than half a million translators currently in the world market. I have heard there is need for at least 10 times, 20 times of those translators who could translate in multiple languages.

What the market data says

Therefore, there is a tremendous scarcity of translators, and thus we can justify how the scenario of the translation market has always been consistently rising. I am just giving you certain data that I have collected from a Common Sense Advisory report - although this data is quite old, from 2012 - but if you look at it: Africa has 0.27%, Asia has 12.88%, Europe has 49.38% and North America has 34.85%. Therefore, if we look at the Asian region, I believe that in the last 5 years the scenario has changed, and there are chances that the percentage of use of the translation market has increased in the Asian region, especially with the internet boom in this region as well.

Known paradigms for linguists

So, when we look at new paradigms in translation that I will talk about in the next few minutes, let us first understand what the known paradigms for translators are: translation, website globalization, software localization, on-site interpreting, multimedia localization, technology, telephone interpreting, voice-over; and we also have some small segments like international testing, quality assurance, subtitling, transcreation, business process outsourcing and video interpreting. Therefore, if we look at the market of activities of these languages, we find translation at the top, then website globalization, and then content writing comes into the picture. So these are the traditionally known activities whereby a linguist gets himself aboard.

Quality control in the supply chain

If we try and understand a large organisation where translation activities take place in a planned way: they have memory, they have a server, they have a team of glossary management, a team of memory management, a team of content writing, a team of proofreaders, a team of quality controllers. So, this particular diagram shows we have content, we have glossary, we have translation memory, we have local content and we have machine segmentation, professional translation, review; and on the right side we have the server, which is linked with machine translation, cloud translation, style-based translation, workflow - and all these interact with each other. No translation is allowed to enter the server if it is not properly checked. If it is not checked and it enters the server, it will pollute the whole translation memory. Therefore, it is mandatory for the organisation to maintain consistency as well as keep strict quality control in order to facilitate better management in translation.

New roles for linguists

So now, in order to understand what is the possibility for translators to play another role in the supply chain, I tried to interact with some industry people. I will mention four of them. In order to understand the roles that a linguist can play in the supply chain, I interacted with a variety of people and I classify them into four categories: one is an individual who is a translator, another is a translation agency owner, the other set is a person who is involved in the legal world supply, and the fourth set is people who are scientists, who are the translation industry leaders, the promoters of the industry.

The first two categories could not think beyond terminology manager, corpora specialist, interpreters - I mean, these are the names that they could define as alternatives for a linguist. Similarly, when I talked to project managers and some industry leaders, they told me names like project manager, localization manager, corpora specialist, subject domain expert, web developer, DTP expert, BPO professional, technology integration expert and cross-cultural researcher.

The translator as entrepreneur

In fact, I had to prompt them with these names in order to research whether they were aware of these terms or not. However, it is very interesting to know that none of them could give me an idea that a translator could evolve as an entrepreneur as well. Later on, I insisted: do you feel that there is an alternative for entrepreneurship also available for translators? Many of them were hesitant, but a few of them were very positive about it, because they had never thought that this can also be the solution.