Machine Translation Market forecast to reach $1.58 billion by 2025, after growing at a CAGR of 13.06% during 2020-2025 owing to high adoption of machine translation technology in end-user verticals such as military and defense, automotive, healthcare and others for automated translation of source material into another language. Many companies have been adopting advanced technologies of hardware and software in order to improve speed and accuracy of machine translation. Growing requirement to localize the rising amount of content in the organizations to eradicate language barriers and to implement a cost-effective translation system in their business process are anticipated to boost the adoption rate of machine translation market size in the near future. The ability of translating different languages according to the customer preferences and lack of existing translators for several specialized fields and language combinations have been providing growth opportunities for the machine translation industry. The growing importance of businesses in emerging markets, creation of online content, and need for enabling global collaboration among employees will further enhance the overall demand for Machine Translation market size during the forecast period 2020-2025.
Key Takeaways
- North America dominates the Machine or automated translation market owing to presence of huge number of players and early adoption of advanced technologies which set to drive the machine translation market.
- Statistical machine translation sector dominates the machine translation market owing to easy adoption and low cost.
- Growing trend in big data set to create huge opportunities for machine translation as computational linguistics and linguistic typology are majorly rely on big data.
- Military and Defense sector is the key end-user for machine translation market owing to increasing government initiatives on machine translation.
Technology - Segment Analysis
Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) segment held the largest share in the Machine Translation market in 2018. SMT technology uses statistical analysis and predictive algorithms in order to define the rules that are suitable for the required sentence translation. The wide availability of algorithms and platforms is one of the major advantages of SMT, which allows the access of large and structured set of text or work at a very cheap rate. Adoption of advanced technology such as cloud computing assists SMT to run in an effective manner, as it offers high processing power and enhanced storage capacity to the computer. Moreover, SMT offers various benefits in terms of customizability, community collaboration, and resource requirement. Furthermore, the demand for cheap, fast computing hardware has enabled the SMT demand as it assists applications that depend on billions of statistics and large data. This is set to drive the demand of statistical machine translation market.
End-User - Segment Analysis
Military and Defense sector has been the primary market for machine translation. The support from governmental organizations such as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) provides extensive funding for machine translation in military & defense industry. In addition, the organization has spoken language communication and Translation System for Tactical Use (TRANSTAC) program intended to evolve transportable two-way speech translation systems that can operate on handheld and laptop devices. According to U.S Federal business, in 2018, the U.S. Army had awarded two contracts for its Machine Foreign Language Translation System (MFLTS) project to the companies Applications Technology (AppTek) for $1.55 million, and another to Raytheon Technologies worth $2.99 million. High investments for machine translation technology in the military and defense sector set to drive the machine translation market.
Geography - Segment Analysis
North America dominated the Machine Translation market with a share of around 34.56%, followed by Europe and APAC. The North America region has a high contribution to the machine translation market owing to the rapid adoption of new technologies such as big data, artificial intelligence, and others by the U.S. companies. The presence of large technology companies offering machine translation services, such as Google, IBM Corporation, Microsoft, and among others have been creating higher growth opportunities in the market. These companies are significantly expanding the capabilities of their translation platforms. Moreover, the U.S. is witnessing rapid growth in the number of natural language processing startups, such as SoundHound, TaskUs, and Tact.ai, influencing the application of these technologies in various industries such as sales, customer support, application developments, and others. The rapid penetration of machine learning and intelligent devices enabled improved speech recognition, processing of human languages, and end-to-end translations. The significant reduction in costs, time required, and ease of translating have been further attracting a greater number of users in automated translation services in North America region.
Drivers – Machine Translation Market
· Growing demand for Big Data
Machine Translation plays a key role in Big Data which deals with large data sets that may be analyzed computationally to reveal trends, patterns and associations relating to human behavior and interactions. In this scenario, machine translation generates faster translations. In the recent years, companies are shifting from translation technologies to cloud-based platforms. The cloud offers access to millions of human translators who can build up translation memory quickly, resulting in better machine translation. According to industryARC estimates, it is expected to be around 440 billion business transactions taking place per day by the end of 2020. Machine Translation offers an adjustable speed balance for corporate and consumer-oriented big data solutions, thereby driving machine translation market growth.
· Growing adoption of machine translation by large enterprises
In the recent years, large numbers of Language Service Providers (LSPs) and enterprises are now integrating machine translation into their business. Many companies have been investing in machine translation technology in order to empower their businesses. For instance, in 2018, Smartcat, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company had raised $7 million of funding. With this funding, the company had integrated with more than 10 machine translation engines, including Google Translate (neural and statistical), Microsoft Translator, Amazon Translate, Baidu, and Yandex Translate. This is set to drive the machine translation market.
Challenges – Machine Translation Market
· Content Localization is the major challenge which affects the growth of Machine Translation Market
Challenges associated with the machine translation are inability to pick up on cultural nuances, contextual content clues, and local colloquial speech. This results in content that can feel a bit robotic, variable, and not completely culturally aligned. It has possibility for diluted marketing and brand messages due to word-for-word translations. In addition to these, it produces uneven quality results depending upon the complexity of task.
Market Landscape
Technology launches, partnerships, acquisitions and R&D activities are key strategies adopted by players in the Machine Translation market. In 2019, the key players of Machine Translation market are - IBM, Microsoft, SDL, Lionbridge Technologies, Omniscien Technologies Inc and among others.
Acquisitions/Technology Launches
- In December 2018, SDL had entered into a partnership with PFU Technical Communications Limited in order to develop solutions that help brands overcome the challenges involved in technical documentation creation, management, and delivery, across the content supply chain, in multiple languages. This partnership had made SDL company in strengthening its machine translation services.
- In November 2018, Microsoft had introduced next-generation neural machine translation technology for Chinese and German from and to English, increasing translation quality and expanding application scenarios. This advancement in technology has been empowering machine translation business of Microsoft, thereby driving the company’s revenue.
