This post is part of G2's 2023 digital trends series. Read more about G2’s perspective on digital transformation trends in an introduction from Emily Malis Greathouse, director, market research, and additional coverage on trends identified by G2’s analysts. 

Machine translation software is here to stay

Since the pandemic, many companies have pivoted to online platforms. To help customers across different geographies, it is necessary to speak their language. Conventionally, a business would hire a team of translators for each region they are expanding into. Now, localization software can help with that.

However, localization software helps with more than just translation. It makes content more relevant to your customer in a specific region in various ways, such as using relevant imagery or any other content that resonate with potential customers within a particular area. It could also be the use of local dialects while translating the content. Companies will continue leveraging these localization tools to promote and market their products and services.

With the fast-paced globalization of businesses, it has become increasingly important to reach out to the market through easier and faster means, and translation software helps with that. Machine translation and translation memory will play a significant role in saving time while creating content in the required language. Machine translation uses a neural network that can use words and sentences just like the human brain thinks about them. This has led companies to look for more such software vendors to help manage their projects.

G2 expects not only is machine translation software here to stay but also expects more accuracy in these software translations in the future. 

G2 data shows traffic growth in the Machine Translation category

The graph below shows the percentage change in the Machine Translation category traffic over months in the year 2022. If we look at the chart closely, it is clear that the latter half of 2022 shows an increase in category traffic for the Machine Translation Software category. There is a 30% increase in traffic for November compared to September, which is expected to increase further in December.

G2 data shows that the category has been witnessing ups and downs in the traffic in the initial months of this year and continues to grow in the second half of the year. The downs in the earlier part of the year could have resulted from changing prices and businesses looking for other suitable options in localization software like translation management and computer-assisted translation that would have been more relevant to a project.  For Computer-Assisted Translation, the traffic was up 3% in March 2022 from February 2022. There also has been a 9% rise in category traffic for the same category in June 2022 from the previous month.

We expect machine translation to become more affordable in the upcoming year because of neural machine translation, which can translate a sizable amount of content in a very short time.

What’s next for localization software?

In recent times, interest rates have been increased to control inflation. Businesses are taking measures to optimize software buying to manage excess expenses. Translation management helps to provide different customers with targeted content. Machine translation and translation management tools help bring your content to the market faster and are more cost effective than manual translation services. Hence, we expect more purchases of localization software by SMBs. 

Edited by Shanti S Nair