IDC

Region Focus: Worldwide

Machine Translation Software 2022 Vendor Assessment

December 2022 | us48325622
Hayley Sutherland

Hayley Sutherland

Senior Research Analyst, Conversational AI & Intelligent Knowledge Discovery

David Schubmehl

David Schubmehl

Research Vice President, Conversational Artificial Intelligence and Intelligent Knowledge Discovery

Product Type:
IDC: MarketScape
This Excerpt Features: Translated

IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Machine Translation Software 2022 Vendor Assessment

Capabilities Strategies Participants Contenders Major Players Leaders

Leaders

TranslatedFeatured Vendor

Amazon Web Services

Google

Major Players

Baidu

Microsoft

RWS

SYSTRAN

Contenders

Unbabel

IDC MarketScape Methodology

IDC Opinion

Any organization that operates in a multilingual environment needs to be able to translate internal and/or external communications in order to be effective. Employees across various regions need to understand critical business processes, customer communications, and technical product information; customers need marketing and other external materials that are translated with particular care to ensure key branding and messaging are not lost. While this work was traditionally done by human translators, as the need for translation at scale has grown and technology has improved, machine translation (MT) software is increasingly being used to help improve speed and consistency while reducing costs in the translation process, particularly for large volumes of content.

Initially, machine translation software was based on handcrafted rules, and then later, it shifted to largely statistical models but still struggled in terms of reaching “human like” translations. As a result, humans still often ended up doing much of this work, increasing costs, timelines, and the risk of inconsistency. Starting around 2016, however, the rise of deep learning marked a shift in the way machine translation is done. Neural machine translation, or artificial intelligence (AI)–based machine translation, uses deep learning (either replacing or in combination with rules-based or statistical models) to train artificial intelligence systems to recognize language patterns and produce increasingly accurate translations. This is the method used by most, if not all, MT software vendors today. During the actual translation process, some systems are fully or semi-supervised by humans, while others perform translation completely unsupervised (note that this may differ from the level of human supervision used in initial training of the neural machine translation models). In some cases, the level of human input for translation workflows can vary based on the language or content type and client-designated accuracy thresholds.

While neural machine translation has been a game changer for the machine translation industry, there still is no universal translation capability, à la Star Trek or other science fiction shows. Most of the neural translation models are good for general language but often don’t handle industry-specific or even company-specific terminology particularly well. In these cases, some vendors offer the capability for organizations to build custom language models that can incorporate and handle industry or even company-specific jargon. However, building custom language models can be time consuming and sometime require large amounts of training data to effectively perform machine translation around very specific types of language. In addition, some vendors are starting to use what they call “adaptive machine translation” models that “learn” and adapt to new words and phrases over time, which lessens the need for custom language models.

Finally, yet another consideration is support and capabilities for a wide variety of languages. Some vendors support translation to and from a wide variety of languages, sometimes ranging into hundreds of language pairs. Again, neural machine translation has been transformative in handling these wide variety of languages, but accuracy and capability will vary substantially based on the popularity of the language and the amount of training data available to the vendor.

As the accuracy of machine translation software has improved, organizations have run into issues with employees using free online translation tools for business use. While these kinds of tools are fast, reasonably accurate, and handy for individual consumer use, they are not intended for business use and are often not secure, resulting in the potential exposure of sensitive information. However, there are a variety of machine translation systems that are designed for enterprise organizations, even for particularly sensitive domains such as finance and healthcare. They are available in a variety of forms, from APIs that can be embedded in various applications to full-service platforms that include the ability to add human validation to the translation workflow. This IDC MarketScape evaluation examines the major enterprise machine translation software products in the market today.

Tech Buyer Advice

  • Carefully consider your intended use cases, including aspects such as required language pairs, content types and formats, real-time communications channels, audio versus text, accuracy levels, formal/informal tone, security/compliance requirements, and customization for industry-, use case-, or brand-specific language. This will help you determine where machine translation will provide the most benefit, as well as which vendors best fit your needs.
  • Beware of the different needs for accuracy levels, tone, localization, and brand-specific language for internal versus external content. While machine translation technology has greatly improved in recent years, many organizations still prefer to have some level of human validation for external content such as marketing and PR materials.
  • Understand your requirements regarding data and model ownership and discuss in detail with any potential vendors. Ask whether customer-specific models remain proprietary to the customer or whether the learnings will be used by the vendor (now or in the future) to train general models/models for other clients. More open systems may give more benefits in terms of continuous improvements to the technology but may also raise privacy or competitive concerns.

Featured Vendor

This section briefly explains IDC’s key observations resulting in a vendor’s position in the IDC MarketScape. While every vendor is evaluated against each of the criteria outlined in the Appendix, the description here provides a summary of each vendor’s strengths and challenges.

Translated

After a thorough evaluation of Translated’s strategies and capabilities, IDC has positioned the company in the Leaders category in this 2022 IDC MarketScape for worldwide machine translation software.

Translated, founded in 1999, is a language services provider (SP) offering neural machine translation software as well as human translation services. Its core IP is ModernMT, an adaptive machine translation technology developed over the course of two EU-funded research projects since 2010. Translated took full ownership of this technology as of May 2022 following a merger. ModernMT provides commercial neural machine translation software with advanced features including document-level translation and real-time adaptivity, enabling it to work with a wide variety of use cases without the need to customize individual models for each. It supports translation between more than 2,100 language combinations and is available for both real-time and batch translation and human-in-the-loop translation workflows that include Translated’s human translation services for validation and customization of complex/high-value content.

Translated is headquartered in Rome, Italy, and is privately held.

Quick facts about Translated include:

  • Year founded: 1999 (ModernMT founded in 2017)
  • Total number of employees: 140
  • Total number of language pairs supported: 56 languages/2,100+ translation combinations
  • Use case focus: General purpose; autoadaptive models automatically adapt to different use cases based on context
  • Deployment options: ModernMT can be deployed on premises, in Translated’s private cloud, or on AWS’ multitenant public cloud offering
  • Pricing model: Translated offers month-to-month, annual, or multiyear contracts with the potential for volume-based discounts (Pricing is on a per-megabyte consumption basis depending on the service required.)
  • Related products/services: In addition to its core machine translation offering, Translated offers related services including professional human translation services, continuous localization, linguistic quality assurance (LQA), subtitling, and voiceover

Strengths

  • Continuous innovation: Translated’s merger with ModernMT is recent, but its involvement with ModernMT goes back to the start-up’s founding in 2017. Its commercial offering is based on ModernMT’s open source technology, allowing Translated to benefit from the innovations of that community. Advanced features include document-level translation and real-time contextual adaptivity.
  • Strong multidomain model: Customers praised the accuracy of ModernMT, particularly its ability to automatically adapt to a wide range of use cases without the need for additional training.

Challenges

  • Limited partner network: While not all machine translation projects require partner involvement, Translated’s lack of partnerships may be limiting for a company of its size. Translated should consider expanding its partner network, particularly to help bolster sales channels, as it grows.
  • Staffing and growth: Translated’s customer- and product-focused approach to its machine translation software has helped the company keep its customers happy thus far, but it will require some reconfiguration to scale as its customer base continues to expand. To maintain strong growth along with its current level of support, Translated will need to continue to expand its infrastructure and employee base, particularly in areas such as sales and marketing.

Consider Translated When

Consider Translated’s ModernMT for machine translation if you are a large, multinational corporation looking for adaptable multidomain support that can be deployed either on premises or via cloud, with related support for areas such as localization and human validation. Translated provides a wide range of related services and products that can assist with translation at scale.

Methodology

IDC MarketScape Vendor Inclusion Criteria

The criteria used for the selection of IT suppliers that were evaluated are the following:

  • The offering should be commercially available for use as a single product family or a suite of services and for purchase by customers for at least one year. IDC will also consider and include new product features and capabilities introduced through the calendar year 2022 as part of vendor strategy evaluation. In addition, IDC will consider these features as part of its capabilities evaluation if there is sufficient customer adoption and use for IDC to properly evaluate them.
  • The product must offer neural machine translation services that organizations can utilize, customize, deploy, and/or also can include in their enterprise applications.
  • The product must have at least 50 customers that have used this solution/service in production in calendar year 2021.
  • The product must be offered and available on a worldwide basis (i.e., sales/support offices in North America and at least one other global region).
  • The product must be all or mostly the vendor’s own intellectual property (IP).

Reading an IDC MarketScape Graph

For the purposes of this analysis, IDC divided potential key measures for success into two primary categories: capabilities and strategies.

Positioning on the y-axis reflects the vendor’s current capabilities and menu of services and how well aligned the vendor is to customer needs. The capabilities category focuses on the capabilities of the company and product today, here and now. Under this category, IDC analysts will look at how well a vendor is building/delivering capabilities that enable it to execute its chosen strategy in the market.

Positioning on the x-axis, or strategies axis, indicates how well the vendor’s future strategy aligns with what customers will require in three to five years. The strategies category focuses on high-level decisions and underlying assumptions about offerings, customer segments, and business and go-to-market plans for the next three to five years.

The size of the individual vendor markers in the IDC MarketScape represents the market share of each individual vendor within the specific market segment being assessed.

IDC MarketScape Methodology

IDC MarketScape criteria selection, weightings, and vendor scores represent well-researched IDC judgment about the market and specific vendors. IDC analysts tailor the range of standard characteristics by which vendors are measured through structured discussions, surveys, and interviews with market leaders, participants, and end users. Market weightings are based on user interviews, buyer surveys, and the input of IDC experts in each market. IDC analysts base individual vendor scores, and ultimately vendor positions on the IDC MarketScape, on detailed surveys and interviews with the vendors, publicly available information, and end-user experiences in an effort to provide an accurate and consistent assessment of each vendor’s characteristics, behavior, and capability.

Market Definition

Machine translation (MT) software is software that can translate between human languages. This includes neural machine translation (NMT), the method used by most (if not all) MT software vendors today, which leverages reinforcement learning and deep learning to recognize language patterns and produce increasingly accurate translations. More traditional techniques, often used in combination with NMT, include rules-based and statistical methods.

Related Research

  • Use all content from Excerpt’s “Related Research”
  • Worldwide Conversational AI Tools and Technologies Forecast, 2022-2026 (IDC #US48508922, July 2022)
  • Worldwide Conversational AI Tools and Technologies Market Shares, 2021: Conversational AI Hits the Mainstream (IDC #US49452622, July 2022)
  • IDC Market Glance: Conversational Artificial Intelligence Technologies, 1Q21 (IDC #US47540221, March 2021)
  • How Important Are Voice-Based Interfaces for Contactless Experiences in the Era of COVID-19? (IDC #US46855320, September 2020)

IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Machine Translation Software 2022 Vendor Assessment