We are excited to launch Slator.com, the source for all things translation, localization, and language technology. Our mission is to keep you current on what is happening in this fast growing space and share news, features, analysis, and coverage of key events. We aim to deliver clear, authoritative, and breaking updates and commentary and become the most useful and insightful destination for language industry intelligence.
Over the next five years the industry will undergo unprecedented change. Machine translation post-editing will become fully integrated and make translators much more productive. While the algorithms will win in many areas, the amount of content that requires high quality human translations will continue to soar in others. English will remain the pivot language, but the shift of gravity in the world economy towards Asia will make Chinese much more important.
Consolidation among vendors will accelerate fast. Large end-clients will consolidate their spend into one or two global vendors. Viable and customer-friendly SaaS solutions will continue to emerge, putting pressure on more locally-rooted companies to either innovate or go out of business. At the top, a language service provider breaking the one billion annual revenue threshold is only a matter of time. And from below, startups will be racing for the next killer application to gain market share.
Finally, of course, there are the many unknown unknowns that we are very much looking forward to covering for you in the months and years ahead.
We are launching Slator.com in phases. What you are seeing now is phase one. Over the coming weeks, we will be adding a number of features and functionalities, like Jobs, Events, the Directory and the RFP Center so make sure to check in regularly.
Image: Slator HQ in Zurich