Top trends found by One Hour Translation include convergence of apps and websites, BYOD, IoT, and data-based marketing.
A recent study by the research department at One Hour Translation, which examined several thousand translation projects in the last year, found six emerging major global technology trends. The study analyzed the content of technology companies, which hired One Hour Translation to translate their content, and concluded which emerging technology trends are most significant.
The top trends found by the study are:
Convergence of applications and websites: more and more multinationals consider their application the primary branding tool of the company. For many, the app itself has become the homepage and identity of the company. One Hour Translation's data point to a 50% increase over the last two years in the number of companies requesting app interface localization.
"Bring Your Own Device" (BYOD): while bringing personal smartphones, tablets or laptops to work was once a big no-no, BYOD has become far more permissible. Increasing demands from multinational enterprises to translate their BYOD policies into different languages highlight this growing international trend. The main target languages are Spanish, German, French, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, and Cantonese.
Enterprise application market is crossing more borders and becoming more open: One Hour Translation saw a 20% increase in enterprise app localization demand in 2014, indicating a far more global and far more open app space. The demand for relevant translation projects shows that more enterprises allow third party software or app developers to integrate their software with their enterprise platforms.
Boom in data-based marketing worldwide: One Hour Translation saw a 25% increase in translation requests for banners and online ads from online global marketing and data mining companies in 2014 - indicating a growing shift to data-based marketing across countries. This growth is fostered by substantially lower big data processing costs.
China and South Korea are the early adopters of IoT: the data reveal that China and South Korea are the manufacturers and the early adaptors of many connected devices developed in Western countries. Increasing demand for Mandarin and Korean technical translations for IoT devices confirms that the Internet of Things is The Next Big Thing.
Natural language search is not ripe yet: Although developers would love to teach computers to understand speech, the current software is far from fluent. Computers may mimic human language, but they still cannot really speak. For now, developers still use human translators to improve their translations. An increase in demand for human translators in the field indicates that actual and effective natural language search on our smartphones is still more talk than reality.