I hope that in 2012 we will be successful. In fact the future is difficult to predict, but I made a little prediction in 2012, will it be foolish? maybe, let it go.

(1) business will be better. Following the somewhat more fragile in 2011, 2012 will be a good year for translation companies. Presidential election year, the U.S. economy is rebounding, this is good news for most people in the food chain. More and more online content to be a translation, which means more business for everyone.

(2) Website and online translation services will exceed the demand for the industry’s growth. The death of the explosion of online content, books and printed materials, the continuous development of smart phones and mobile readers will increase the translation of websites and other online content needs.

(3) Cloud services can be customized engine. People will be able to use their own training corpus to create a customized machine translation engine, without having to invest in expensive servers and software development. Microsoft has been set up in the cloud services can be customized into the cloud services, collaborative translation feature. Let’s MT is a European company, has begun beta testing the concept of this system (in November last year, they invited us to start testing the system; not ready, but the system shows great hope that this year should be ready). Machine translation is also considering a SaaS (Software Operation) mode, we might see some in 2012.

(4) further integration. Big companies like Transperfect, WeLocalize and SDL will continue to grow through strategic mergers and acquisitions. The big companies will get bigger, some smaller players will be eliminated.

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(5) Facebook will continue to machine translation into social networks. In 2011 through the integration will be translated already started. They will continue to add new language features, to help break down language barriers.

(6) Translation prices will continue to decline. People, especially the translators who hold an attitude of denial, contrary to my views at this point, but I still think the price of human translation will continue to decline, because of the large-scale LSP (layered service provider) and translation services, buyers tend to more the use of post-editing machine translation workflow.

(7) More unemployed translator. Freelancers who refuse to adapt to industry changes and reliance on outdated translation model will work in the 2012 fight heap. Some people may not be able to find work, and may need to consider a career change.

(8) Voice to voice translation in 2012 will not mature for regular commercial products. In my opinion, people will continue to talk about a universal translator, but that technological progress is less than the killer voice to voice applications become available for commercial use version.

(9) European translators and translation companies will become increasingly cost-competitive. The euro against the U.S. dollar ratio in the past few weeks has been devalued by nearly 10%. If the economic forecasts come true, the euro will fall further in 2012. Such U.S. companies to buy translation services in Europe will become more economically viable.

(10) SDL will launch a new post-editing software. SDL has machine translation into Trados Studio 2009 version, the machine translation of documents and the contents of the late editor. I predict that the SDL will release new software in 2012 machine translation post-editing process can be done automatically, so that the translation faster, easier to automate.