What are the challenges in Indic Language Translation Industry in India?  

India has 560 million internet users and the number is growing because of easy access to smartphones and the internet. This makes us the second largest online market after China. By next year, we estimate about 500 million Indian language internet users to be online apart from the 200 million Indians who access the internet in English. Hence, it is very important that the Indian internet also has an adequate amount of content in Indian languages, which today is only 0.1%. 

Today, both consumers and sellers are going online but cannot engage due to a language barrier. To build digital India businesses, government bodies need to provide content in local languages. And this requirement has provided a significant boost to the Indian translation Industry.   

The Indian translation industry is young and evolving as compared to the translation industry in developed nations which have an organised workflow in place. Besides, India is a country of 22 official languages and many dialects.  

The challenges faced by the industry can be summarised by 3U’s:   

• Unorganised: If an Entrepreneur or a Business realises the importance of going digital in different languages to reach their target audience,  it is difficult to find a source that will be able to deliver the translations as per their specific requirements.   

• Unreliable: The second major challenge is unreliability in terms of cost, quality and turnaround time. 

• Unscalable:  Let us assume that we have about 10,000 words that need to be translated into 10 Indian languages. Few agencies will be able to complete this work within a reasonable timeframe. However, with growth in business, if the number of words to be translated goes up to 50,000 words, most agencies will not be able to complete the work in a reasonable time, as scalability is a huge challenge in this industry.  

Reverie is trying to address the ‘3U Challenges’ faced by the Indian translation services industry.  

What are the trends that will disrupt the Translation Industry in 2020? 

The major trend that will disrupt the translation industry in India is the surge in the number of companies or institutions who want to go local digitally. Use of local language content will result in the addition of more non-English users to India’s internet user base. 

In the current Covid-19 scenario, we predict that 80 per cent businesses will be willing to localise their content to reach more audience. This will help the translation industry grow in the post-COVID world. 

How does technology help students to opt translation as their career opportunity to boost ease of creating flexible jobs in the creative translation Industry? 

The beauty of the internet is that it provides equal access to everybody with no barrier. Being a translation service provider can be a means of generating income for the students. They can sign up on Prabandhak which is a unique cloud-based, AI-powered translation management hub that ensures swift, easy, and accurate localization. 

Prabandhak helps to connect both the demand and supply side of translation Industry via the in-built marketplace. On the demand side, companies will be publishing their translation requirements on the marketplace. On the supply side, there are two kinds of users – One, are the students who want to opt for a career as an Independent Translator and second are established translation agencies offering translation services. So, a platform like Prabandhak can help students get access to full-time or part-time translation work.