The rapidly evolving, dynamic marketplace today has created an enormous spike in the demand for Machine Translation (MT) in a number of industries. According to a new study by Grand View Research, the global Machine Translation market is expected to reach USD 983.3 million by 2022. This is a huge leap from 2014, when the MT market was valued at USD 331.7 million, and this growth projection mirrors a trend in the market. Thanks to globalization, there is an increased demand for cost efficiency in translation, but the amount of linguistic knowledge and time required for translating all the content for a particular business exceeds the capacity of human translation alone.
Key Insights into the Machine Translation Market
Some of the key insights about Machine Translation that the study discusses are summed up here:
- Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) is a clear winner over Rules Based Machine Translation (RBMT), when it comes to the present market requirement.
- Globalization and the need to address diverse cultural groups has led to the popularity of translation technology in Asia Pacific, thus opening up new potential markets for MT providers.
- Proliferation of smartphones and increasing internet penetration is expected to drive MT market growth.
- Machine translation as a service (MTSaaS) makes use of SMT and is accessible via the web. This allows users to customise their MT engines with their own Translation Memories (TMs).
What this means is that, deploying an integrated MT solution will become a critical success factor for gaining market share in the future.
Potential Challenges
The study reveals major challenges for the MT industry, which includes a lack of quality translations and Quality Estimation (QE) and competition from free translation service providers. Needless to say, a well-rounded back-end knowledge base, along with efficient NLP (Natural Language Processing) capabilities and a scalable model are critical to gaining competitive advantage in the market. The MT providers need to go above and beyond their role as simply providing machine translation services; they need to become solution providers.
How is KantanMT contributing to the MT market?
The KantanMT platform offers massive competitive advantage, not only because we were one of the first entrants in the MT market, but also because thanks to our strategic market insights, we have already identified most of these challenges and developed solutions to address them. As solution providers, we use an intuitive approach that can be summed up in a few words: speed, scalability, simplicity, and security.
Speed
In a market where new products and innumerable variants of those products are being developed almost every day, it is important to have on-demand translated content ready to be deployed. KantanMT helps its clients have the first leap advantage over their competitors by translating content on the fly.
KantanMT engines have the capacity to translate 114 million words in a single day and as of 7 September, 2015, we have exceeded 2 billion translated words, with 1 billion words being translated in the last two months itself.
Scalability
As a business trying to make its mark in the global MT market, it is extremely important to have a solution that has limitless scalable potential. KantanMT engines with scaling technologies such as the KantanAutoScale are devised to ensure that no matter how sudden the spike in content is, the quality and volumes of translated content will never suffer.
The power of KantanMT’s engine was summed up Tony O’Dowd, Founder and Chief Architect of KantanMT.com,
“We are only starting to see the potential growth of the Machine Translation market, and I doubt any other player can operate at this scale as flawlessly.”
Simplicity
Simplicity is at the very core of KantanMT. The company name itself is derived from the Japanese word for simplicity 簡単 (かんたん). KantanMT strives to take the complexity out of the user interface, while powerful MT engines do all the hard work in the back end. Easy to understand analytics can be generated through the KantanMT engines to gather insights into improving engine quality and maintaining translation quality.
Security
Cloud based MT solutions have become the industry norm. However, security concerns are high – especially, if you are in the eCommerce industry or deal with legal information. KantanMT’s multilayered security approach protects and monitors translations ensuring all industry secrets are safe. Unlike a number of open source translating tools, you own the source as well as translated words.
Final words
One of the key findings of the Grand View Research review points out that “strategic joint ventures, coupled with mergers and acquisitions, (which) have been among the key strategies adopted” by major players in the Machine Translation industry. KantanMT recognises the importance of both industry and academic relationships in building a complete MT ecosystem.
With KantanAPI integration, powerful KantanMT engines can be plugged into Translation Management workflows with ease. Our Developer Partners include companies like Kilgray, Memsource and Alchemy Software Development.
We work with a number of Language Service Providers, and some of our Preferred MT Suppliers include Milengo, MediaLocate and more recently Turkish LSP, Transistent. We are proud to have a strong relationship with leading Industry Associations such as the ADAPT Centre, TAUS and EAMT among others. Moreover, our University Partner Program aims to further education in Machine Translation for new industry graduates.
Contact the KantanMT Team, info@kantanmt.com to learn more about the KantanMT platform.