2020 is the beginning of a new decade, it’s the year of the rat and the Tokyo 2020 Olympics! But what will 2020 have in store for the translation industry? Here are a few translation trends we think will be big this year… Industry growth An increase in globalization due to the internet and the integration of people, companies and cultures means that the demand for language services is continuing to rise as people need to communicate with people from other countries, in different languages. As organizations continue to make their products and services available in more languages, CSA predicts that the language services industry will continue to grow and that the market will increase to $56.18 billion by 2021. Transcreation As globalization increases, transcreation is becoming more and more popular in the translation industry due to companies recognising that they cannot use just one approach when communicating with clients worldwide. Transcreation is a process that involves both localisation and creativity, and the idea is to transform the content so that it appears as if it was first created in that language. Transcreation is commonly used for marketing materials that companies want adapting to suit their overseas target markets. Voice search Voice search is expected to soar in the upcoming years and in 2020 it is predicted that 50% of all search queries will be voice-based, which isn’t surprising considering the increasing popularity of Amazon’s Alexa, Google’s Home Assistant and Apple’s Siri. Therefore, in order for brands to rank higher on search engines, they will not only need to consider what keywords their consumer might type in on search engines but also what they might say. The difficulty with identifying what words and phrases consumers might use for voice search is that there can be many differences between the way someone speaks and the way they write/type. Also, individuals have their own accents and dialects which means identifying key voice search phrases for an entire target market is not an easy job, especially if a brand wants to reach foreign consumers as well as consumers in their domestic market. This will also mean that international SEO will continue to be extremely valuable to expanding businesses. Video Translation Video content is already dominating the internet as Cisco Study Visual Networking Index (VNI) forecasts that “1 million minutes of video will be streamed or downloaded every second in 2021. The world will be watching 3 trillion minutes of internet video per month by 2021.” This video content can include anything from short YouTube videos or full movies on Netflix. Video ads are also becoming increasingly more popular as it was predicted that in 2019 and 2020, 80% of online content will be video rather than text or image-based. This increase in video advertising comes from the fact that video ads have a much higher conversion rate than other ad types, as bestselling author Ben Angel explains how conversion rates on landing pages that feature videos increase by up to 80%. This increase in video content will impact the translation industry as it will lead to a higher demand for video translation services such as subtitling, dubbing and voiceover services. We can’t wait to see what 2020 will be like for the translation industry and Language Insight! What do you think will be big news this year in the translation industry or your sector? Let us know in the comments below!
