[lg policy] Five predictions about language for 2009

[Harold Schiffman]

Predictions for 2009: How Right Were We?
Donald A. DePalma 9 December 2009



Each year, besides predicting what will happen in the coming 12
months, we review what we thought would happen in the prior year. How
many of our predictions from December 2008 came true? Let’s take a
look.


“Speech takes center stage as ‘the’ multilingual issue.” We predicted
that spoken language communication would become an expected feature
from mobile carriers, consumer-facing organizations, and government
agencies. Crystal ball assessment: The telephone interpreting market
grew at record rates, and Language Line brought on-demand interpreting
directly to consumers via the iPhone, Google Translate made a new
text-to-speech feature available, and we spoke on the intersection of
speech recognition and machine translation at SpeechTek.

“Translation gets easier, but everyone struggles to find the money.”
We wrote that companies would struggle with language service provider
(LSP) and internal staff labor costs, flat or declining budgets, and
increased demand for more content in more languages for both developed
and emerging markets. Crystal ball assessment: In this troubled
economic climate, localization and translation planners found
themselves fighting for limited funding. However, business confidence
quickly recovered in the language services industry.

“Machine translation (MT) enters corporations via high-value
applications.” We thought that MT software vendors might break out of
the dominant low or no-revenue model with applications focused on real
business needs. Crystal ball assessment: We certainly observed a major
uptick in MT usage and consideration for customer care, intranet
information feeds, and employee communication. Several LSPs did begin
offering MT-related services like post-editing. However, we only saw
the broad outlines of MT melding with enterprise search technology.

“Google pulls more surprises out of its bag of translation tricks.” We
forecast that Google would keep rolling out language technology and
that corporate users would sidestep LSPs and software purchases by
“shopping” at Google. Crystal ball assessment: Google certainly
energized the computer-aided translation (CAT) tools market with its
stealthy announcements, but, to the best of our knowledge, didn’t
beta-test company-specific MT partitions to gauge reaction to an MT
appliance. We did see smart freelancers and corporate users employing
Google Translate as a free productivity tool.

“Language policy and international self-preservation fuel government
interest in language.” We said that incoming President Obama would
focus more attention on international communication, translation, and
interpretation. Crystal ball assessment: He did, with enforcement of
the linguistic provisions of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and a
call to use machine translation in his strategic vision for
competitiveness. In Europe, the 27 member states of the E.U. ratified
the Lisbon Treaty, providing unprecedented protection against
linguistic discrimination.

Each of our five predictions included several subtopics. We’d say that
our prediction about speech technology is still en route to becoming a
reality, but that we scored plenty of points on each of the other
four. Read our predictions for 2010 and check back with us next
December for the scorecard.

 http://www.globalwatchtower.com/2009/12/09/post-mortem-predict-2009/
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