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A friend asked, “what will happen when the cloud gets filled up and can’t hold any more videos?” Given the cloud metaphor, that’s not an illogical question – when stratocumulus clouds fill with water, we get rain or snow. As new technologies hoover up ever more data and content – numbers, text, images, audio, video – and suppliers sell unlimited cloud storage, you might wonder when it will start raining bits.
In any case, we’re not running out of data storage now but it’s clear that we’ll need ever more energy-intensive data centers to keep pace with the annual doubling of digital information (“The Calculus of Translation”). And if current data flows weren’t enough, new streams of content are gushing into data centers in all the world’s digital languages – and are likely to be joined by a variety of transcribed variants in some of the other several thousand non-digital languages.
CSA Research is tracking three content gushers:
These three additions will further stretch the seams of repositories already bursting with a ballooning body of textual and structured content. But it’s not just size that matters. Having spent a good part of my life working for database management ISVs, I’ve internalized several fundamental concepts about data. Confidence in the data heads the list.
The realities and requirements of all that source content, its sundry mutations including translation, and the lack of business alignment between the two guided us in writing our annual look-ahead for the language market, “Seven Trends for Globalization in 2023.” The language services and technology sector earned US$52 billion in 2022, growing to a projected US$65 billion by 2026.
Why do we think these long-term content, connectivity, and operational issues will begin to get more attention in the next few years? The materials and means to do so have fallen into place over the last decade. We are in the center of a perfect storm that has inundated the world with enormous amounts of data and content, algorithms that are beginning to make sense (and nonsense) of it, and enough computing power with increasingly affordable GPUs to process it.
As organizations organize and leverage these three assets across their applications, CSA Research views them as seeding a future Cambrian explosion of creativity and innovation derived from deep learning, optimizations, financial and social profit, and as yet unanticipated epistemic benefits from their collective multilingual source and transformed content. And, of course, transformations linguistic and otherwise will expand the total available market into the 53% where English just doesn’t cut it.
It won’t happen in 2023, but with the right vision and investment starting sooner rather than later, we can hope to experience those future advances instead of being mired in the pundits’ dystopia of translators and proofreaders working as janitors who edit sketchy MT output or muck out automata-generated logorrhea. Per aspera ad astra!
Want to hear more about these topics? Join me, Arle Lommel, and Alison Toon for a discussion of these topics on January 17th. Register here: https://csa-research.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_o-3kgI2oSkKl62CNOWDxOg
Photo credit: Jimmy Chan
Chief Research Officer
Focuses on market trends, business models, and business strategy
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