Language Requirements in Europe, USA, and Asia

This is re-post from our Main Analyst blog by Kaija Poysti on January 8.

Traveling in Europe during the holidays reminded me again on the importance of languages in the European market. With Bulgaria and Romania joining the EU the size of the European market increased yet again - and made it even more language-intensive. American companies wanting to sell to the European market, or outsource their business processes in the quite interesting former Eastern Europe, need to add yet a couple of more languages to be maintained in materials, web sites etc.

For those interested in reading more about the differences of language requirements in Europe, USA, and Asia, and on the solutions being developed for them, http://www.tc-star.org/pubblicazioni/D17_HLT_ENG.pdf provides an interesting European view. With the rapidly growing requirement for faster and cheaper translations, maximal utilization of automation is the only solution to meet the multilingual needs. This will include a shift towards giving end-users more tools to both understand and produce material in other languages. I believe that some of such new tools will come from outside the traditional translation industry: content management, collaboration tools or similar.

One of the big questions will be: can Machine Translation provide a solution? This will be the topic of my next blog.