The generation of large volumes of data across several industries is one of the major factors fueling the need for machine translation solutions. The shift from analog to digital technologies and the surging number of mobile devices and applications are propelling the generation of data across the globe. Big data is pushing up the requirement for high-speed and cost-efficient translation. As per a research, human translators around the world can address less than one-millionth part of the content created every day.

As machine translation can cope with extremely high volumes of data, reduce the costs associated with translation, and perform at high speeds, several language service providers (LSPs) are rapidly adopting machine translation tools with human translation for providing an improved customer experience. Additionally, with burgeoning requirement, the machine translation industry has been adopting advancements, such as custom machine translation (CMT). The digital universe is predicted to reach zettabytes of data by 2020, which will further boost the demand for machine translation in the coming years.

Currently, around 36% of the global data is generated in emerging economies, and this share is predicted to rise to nearly 62% by 2020, which will consequently support the expansion of the global machine translation market. According to the estimates of the market research company, PS Intelligence, the revenue of the market will surge from $122.3 million in 2016 to $195.4 million by 2023. Furthermore, the market is predicted to grow at a CAGR of more than 6.0% from 2017 to 2023.

Travel and hospitality, banking and finance, legal and law firms, electronics, retail and manufacturing, information technology (IT) and telecom services, media and entertainment, automotive, legal and law firms, healthcare and life sciences, and military and defense sectors are the major application areas of machine translation solutions. Out of these, the demand for these solutions was found to be the highest in healthcare and life sciences, travel and hospitality, automotive, and military and defense sectors in the years gone by.

These solutions are either deployed via cloud or on-premises. Between these two, the deployment of these solutions was observed to be higher via on-premises in the past. However, the SaaS deployment of machine translation solutions, which is based on the cloud architecture, was recently started becoming popular. This has subsequently created a huge opportunity for the use of machine translation by businesses looking for managed cloud-based services. Geographically, Asia-Pacific (APAC) is predicted to be the fastest-growing region in the machine translation market in the future, owing to the surging number of high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs) and growing income levels of people in the region.

Hence, it can be safely said that the demand for machine translation tools will soar in the upcoming years, owing to the generation of large volumes of data, on account of the increasing internet and mobile device penetration and rapid digitization of business operations across the world.