Abstract
The international translation industry is undergoing fundamental changes with the potential of disrupting the market and the business basis of many freelance translators. This paper outlines the present scenario in the field of non-literary translations, its development, reasons, symptoms and current trends. Analogous to the established concept of “Industry 4.0”, the philosophy of an emerging new translation industry can be called “Translation 4.0”. Challenged by a continuously growing demand for translations, increasingly volatile markets, fierce global competition and aggressive pricing, the translation industry is responding with fully digitized data handling, real-time project management, strictly organized processes, quality control, short response times and comprehensive added-value services for clients. Key variables in this new work environment are fragmentation of projects to accelerate turn-around times, outsourcing, crowdsourcing, teamworking, connectivity, cloud-based translation platforms, integrated – and often compulsory – translation tools and, last but not least, machine translation (MT) and post-editing of MT (PEMT). Due to the closing gap between the quality of human translations (HT) and neural MT (in particular of DeepL), MT will cover a growing share of the low-end translation market volume, with the consequence that translators who cannot offer a substantially better value (i. e. quality/price ratio) than MT will become obsolete. The future will be for translators who have the competencies defined in the EMT (European Masters’ of Translation) and who adapt to the changing translation ecosystem.
Note
This paper is based on my opening speech at the LICTRA conference, University Leipzig, on March 12, 2017, and on a plenary paper given at The Chinese University of Hong Kong in Shenzhen on November 26, 2016. – Many thanks to Timothy Jones for his excellent edits.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
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- Translation 4.0 – Evolution, Revolution, Innovation or Disruption?
- General academic language in German-English translation: a nuanced view
- Corpus paralelos y traducción especializada: ejemplificación de diseño, compilación y alineación de un corpus paralelo bilingüe (inglés-español) para la traducción jurídica
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- Translation 4.0 – Evolution, Revolution, Innovation or Disruption?
- General academic language in German-English translation: a nuanced view
- Corpus paralelos y traducción especializada: ejemplificación de diseño, compilación y alineación de un corpus paralelo bilingüe (inglés-español) para la traducción jurídica
- Subtitling Virtual Reality into Arabic: Eye Tracking 360-Degree Video for Exploring Viewing Experience
- Understanding the Nature of Arab-Israeli Conflict: A Corpus-based Study of Semantic Prosody in Arabic Political Discourse
- An Inter-Linguistic Analysis on Multimodal Coupling of German and Chinese Tourism Video Commercials – A comparative Study based on ELAN
- German literature translated into Albanian and its cultural and literary influence on Albanian literature
- Metadiscourse Features in two English Translations of the Holy Quran: A Comparative, Corpus-based Inquiry
- Zur Übersetzung textdeiktischer Verweise in normiertn Fachtexten: Ergebnisse einer empirischen Untersuchung an einem viersprachigen Korpus europäischer Patentschriften
- Wenn das Produkt zum Flirt wird – multimodale Textualität am Beispiel von In-App-Werbung bei Tinder
- Zeitvermittlung als Kulturtransfer am Beispiel der deutschen Übersetzung von Ousmane Sembènes Novelle Le mandat (Die Postanweisung)
- Übersetzen in philologischen Studiengängen. Bestandsaufnahme und neue Ansätze für die Übersetzung Italienisch-Deutsch
- Rezension
- Heller, Lavinia (2013): Translationswissenschaftliche Begriffsbildung und das Problem der performativen Unauffälligkeit von Translation. Berlin: Frank & Timme. TransÜD Arbeiten zur Theorie und Praxis des Übersetzens und Dolmetschens 51. 325 Seiten.
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