Common Sense Advisory's predictions for 2011: increased visibility for language services
Every year Common Sense Advisory publishes a set of predictions for the language services industry, built on its own qualitative and quantitative research. The 2011 list has one organising idea running through it: language stops being invisible. It moves out of the back office, out of procurement, and onto the radar of the people who run global and domestic organisations.
Here is what the firm expects.
The ten predictions
- Marketers of everyday products feature built-in language support.
- Translation energizes customer experiences.
- Fiscal scars trigger spending sobriety.
- Project managers at global organizations face an identity crisis.
- Nervous tolerance of machine translation turns into enthusiastic acceptance.
- Crowdsourced and user-generated content displaces internal documentation and technical support.
- Global and multilingual social media become areas of domain expertise.
- Marketers grab the language opportunity by the long tail.
- Video and audio skills create localization stars.
- Hybrid buyer and supplier organizations make waves in the industry.
What the list is really saying
Read together, these are not ten separate forecasts. They are one argument in ten parts, and the argument is that language has been misclassified. For most of the past two decades, translation sat in the same budget category as printing: a cost incurred at the end of a project, negotiated down as hard as possible, and measured in cents per word. The language industry has spent years trying to argue its way out of that box. Common Sense Advisory is saying the box is finally breaking.
The mechanism is revenue. When a company discovers that a product page in Brazilian Portuguese converts at a materially different rate than the English one, translation stops being a compliance chore and becomes a growth lever. Once that happens, the budget conversation changes: not how little can we spend, but what is the return on the next language.
The machine translation turn
The most consequential prediction is the fifth. Nervous tolerance turning into enthusiastic acceptance is a polite way of describing a collapse in resistance. For years, buyers used machine translation quietly and denied it publicly. Suppliers denounced it and used it anyway. What changed is that statistical engines got good enough for specific, bounded jobs: high-volume support content, user reviews, internal documentation, anything where speed matters more than polish.
The practical shape of this is not machines replacing translators. It is machines doing the first pass and translators doing the second, a workflow that only pays off if the engine is trained on the right data and plugged into the right tools. Agencies that learned how to fold machine translation into their existing workflows into their existing systems found their throughput rose without their quality collapsing. Those that bolted an engine onto a broken process simply produced bad work faster.
Crowds, the long tail and the collapse of the manual
Two of the predictions belong together. If crowdsourced and user-generated content displaces internal documentation, then the material a company most needs translated is no longer the material it wrote. It is the material its customers wrote: forum answers, reviews, community fixes, the thread that solves the problem the official manual never mentions. That content is enormous, it changes daily, and no one is going to pay professional rates to translate all of it.
The long tail point follows directly. The commercially interesting phrases in any market are rarely the twenty terms the marketing department chose. They are the thousands of odd, specific, low-volume searches that add up to more traffic than the head terms do. Capturing those requires volume, which requires cheap throughput, which brings the argument straight back to machine translation and community contribution.
Video, audio and the identity crisis
The prediction about video and audio skills creating localization stars has aged well. Subtitling, voiceover, dubbing and the file-wrangling that goes with them are genuinely harder than document work, and the pool of people who can do them properly is small. Prices reflect that.
The identity crisis facing project managers is the least glamorous item and the most human. If part of the work becomes automated, part becomes crowdsourced, and part becomes video, the person who used to shepherd Word files through a linear process must become something else: a workflow designer, a quality analyst, a data curator. Some will make that jump. Others will find the job has quietly stopped existing.
Hybrids and built-in language support
The last prediction, about hybrid buyer and supplier organisations, describes a specific and awkward creature: the large company that builds an internal translation team, gets good at it, and then starts selling the capability to others. It happens in banking, in pharma and in software, and it distorts the market, because the hybrid competes with the very agencies it buys from and knows exactly what they pay their linguists.
Built-in language support, meanwhile, is the quiet one. It means language stops being a layer applied to a finished product and becomes a design constraint from the first sprint: interfaces that expand for German, date formats that survive Japan, a support flow that does not fall apart when the customer answers in Turkish. Retro-fitting that is expensive. Designing for it costs almost nothing.
The caveat buried in prediction three
Fiscal scars trigger spending sobriety. That single line tempers everything else on the list. The visibility Common Sense Advisory forecasts arrives alongside buyers who have been burned, who scrutinise invoices, and who will not tolerate vague quality claims. More attention is not automatically more money. It is more scrutiny.
Taken as a whole, the forecast describes a market growing more numerous and more diverse on both sides, with buyer requirements and vendor offerings evolving in step. Technology and service providers sit in the middle of that evolution. Practitioners were already arguing about most of this in places like r/TranslationStudies, usually with less optimism than the analysts.