[…] 2016 was actually a really good year for machine translation technology, as MT had a lot more buzz than it has had in the past 10 years and some breakthrough advances in the basic technology. It was also the year I left Asia Online, and got to engage with the vibrant and much more exciting and rapidly moving world of MT outside of Thailand. As you can see from this blog, I had a lot more to say after my departure. The following statements are mostly just opinions (with some factual basis) and I stand ready to be corrected and challenged on every statement I have made here. Hopefully some of you who read this may have differing opinions that you may be willing to share in the comments.

MT Dominates Global Translation Activity

For those who have any doubt about how pervasive MT is today, (whatever you may think of the output quality), the following graphic makes it clear. To put this in context, Lionbridge reported about 2B words translated in the year, and SDL just informed us earlier this month that they do 100M words a month (TEP) and over 20B+ words/month with MT. The MT vendor translated words, together with the large public engines around the world would probably easily make over 500B MT words a day! Google even provided us some sense of what the biggest languages if you look closely below. My rough estimation tells me that this means that the traditional translation industry does about 0.016% of the total words translated every day or that computers do ~99.84% of all language translation done today.

See the full post in eMpTy Pages here: http://kv-emptypages.blogspot.com/2016/12/the-machine-translation-year-in-review.html

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