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Business is looking good in the language sector. CSA Research’s business confidence survey of the CEOs of the largest language service providers found 2017 to be a growth year, and respondents optimistically entered 2018. Sector revenue and language output continue to rise as the content and code that power economies are becoming more global. Our annual survey will give a more complete picture of the market as we collect and analyze the data. This optimism plays out against a backdrop of concerns about the future of language services, on both the demand and supply side of the market. Buyers worry about the need to process ever-growing content volumes into more language pairs – but with relatively stable budgets. Meanwhile, they must deal with their management’s expectations that Amazon and Google Translate will take care of that pesky language problem once and for all – and with less complexity and at a lower cost. On the supply side, LSPs express fundamental anxiety about the sustainability of their business models. We hear concerns across all tiers of the language service market:
In conversation after conversation, we witness debates about technology. On one side, advocates pitch the importance of advanced technology to growth and scalability. On the other, naysayers anxiously await the swarms of AI-driven language bots and machine learning that will surely exterminate their companies. Their concern extends beyond machine translation to project management − will simple rule-based automation and deep machine learning conspire to eliminate the last humans on the language shop floor? CSA Research characterizes this angst as techno-phobia − or maybe more precisely, phobAI or its homophone FOBAI, the fear of being AI’d out of existence. But we contend that FOBAI is a symptom of a bigger problem – mistaken identity. LSPs concerned about having automation wipe them out think they’re in the translation business. They’re not. Language service providers are business process outsourcers (BPOs), traditionally tasked with the job of rendering one language into another but now on the cusp of a much broader role managing more of the content assets for their digitizing clients. While conventional agencies still quibble about how many pennies they charge to translate a word, their buyers are far more interested in bigger content issues tied to their digital transformation. These clients are bringing all their information online, optimizing it, adapting and adopting technology to manage it, and making those assets available across the enterprise. This digitization has forced them to re-think internal systems and processes, pry open databases and content management systems, and educate their staff and suppliers in this new model. How will their clients’ digitization strategies transform the LSPs supplying them?
This existential threat of FOBAI most terrifies those companies that hang their hats on simple translation. Rather than having their translation businesses AI’d out of existence, LSPs can invest in their own transformation into global content service providers. Their BPO future is to move higher in the content value chain with support for global content management, marketing communications, customer care, and the customer experience. They will manage content in any form, both source and target, as they service the growing requirements of their clients' digital transformation.
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