Translate everything? Seriously? Yes. Everything.

At the beginning of the year, we released our TTI report with thousands of responses from across the localization industry. The report confirmed what we’ve known anecdotally for quite some time. Everyone involved in translation is experiencing increased pressure to translate more content into more languages, faster. Basically, as more companies expand into new markets, the demand for localized content has grown exponentially.

But too often this expanse requires those same companies to make compromises, choosing the most commercially-relevant content and languages over the best customer experience for everyone. And while we have steadily increased the amount of content we translate as an industry year over year, we still fall far short of providing comprehensive experiences for too many people in the world.

But what if we stopped triaging content or languages and aimed instead to "translate everything"? What if we made it our collective goal to ensure that every piece of content is available in every language? Just imagine a world where all content is available to everyone:

1. Increased inclusion and diversity

Language barriers are a major obstacle for people who want to access information or participate in various activities. By translating everything, we ensure that everyone has equal access to information, regardless of their language skills or cultural background.

2. Economic growth

By translating everything, companies can expand their reach and tap into new markets, leading to greater revenue and job creation, promoting economic growth and improving living standards around the world.

3. More accessible education and learning

Consider the impact on education: improved access, particularly for people who live in regions where their native language is not widely spoken. This can help break down barriers to education and promote lifelong learning.

4. Empowered communities

When content is available in all languages, we bridge the gap between different communities, promote cross-cultural understanding, and reduce the risk of misunderstandings. This can lead to stronger relationships and greater cooperation among different groups.

5. Better global communication

When everything is available in all languages, it facilitates trade, diplomacy, and other forms of international cooperation. This can help increase peace and stability around the world.

I want to live in that world, and hopefully you do too. Of course this is aspirational, and we won’t get there overnight. But there’s never been a better time to set this goal for ourselves. With emerging technologies like generative AI, and comprehensive, extensible translation platforms like Trados, we are closer to reaching this goal than ever before. Obviously there are many organizations that will continue to pick and choose what and where they translate content. But we set seemingly impossible goals in order to create profound change, and we’ll never know how much we can achieve until we set the bar higher than what is possible today.

And this is why we are embracing this goal for Trados. Do we translate everything yet? No we don’t. But starting now, we are setting this goal for ourselves and challenging the rest of the industry to follow suit. What’s more, we’re committed to creating a platform that enables you to achieve this goal. It’s not enough to support the most popular languages, file formats, or translation processes. It’s definitely too limiting to ask you to use only one technology solution for all your translation needs. Instead we strive to provide a rich ecosystem, full of technology and service providers, unlimited by language or scale requirements, that can help all of us build the right solution to truly translate everything.

We invite you to join us. Translate everything, with Trados.

Published on April 13 2023 in Product

about Andrew Thomas Andrew Thomas is the Head of Marketing for Trados, a leading provider of translation and localization software. He enjoys explaining complex concepts in a simple and understandable way. With over 25 years of experience in the industry, Andrew writes about a variety of topics such as translation management, linguistic AI, and translator productivity.