Доклад: Significance of translation in contemporary life

Machine translation

Human translation

Europe & the United States

2.5 million pages

300 million pages

Japan

3.5 million pages

150 million pages

The development of both machine translation (MT) and human translation (HT) is based on demand and supply. On the one hand, there is availability of new technology and on the other, socio-political and economic need for change. Despite the advances in technology, machine translation presents only a small percentage of the market. At the beginning of the 1990s the translation market was as follows:

It can be seen from the above table that only 6 million pages were translated through machine translation, whereas through human translation 450 million pages were translated which implied that MT covered only 1.3% of the total. This percentage has not changed much in recent years as well. Market analysts say that MT will remain only about 1% of an over US $10 billion translation marketplace .

According to Allied Business Intelligence, the size of the "human translation" market is around US$11.5 billion and "machine translation" US$134 million in 2007. Software localization reached US$3.4 billion in the same year. Another market segment with strong expected growth is technical documentation.

Japan Translation Market

Japanese language translation took the second position which reflected the importance of the role of Japan in technology and foreign trade. In Japanese language translation, of all fields , technology occupied two-thirds of translation volume at the end of the 1990s:

Foreign Trade	25%
Science	10%
Teaching	10%
Literature	5%
Journals	5%
Business Administration	5%

China's Translation Market

China's translation industry is a big industry and China can now claim to be a translation giant. According to the China Bibliographic Library, between 1978 and 1990, China had published 28,500 kinds of translated works, and the number grew to 94,400 between 1995 and 2003. According to the Translators Association of China, China's translation market is anywhere between US$ 1.3bn and US$ 2.5bn. China's translation industry accounted for 1.33 billion US$ annually in the later part of 1990s, and that number grew to 21 2.53 billion $ in 2005.

Global Translation Market