Why growth in multimedia is helping the localisation industry

A great deal of this growth stems from the increasing usage of artificial intelligence (AI) and neural machine translation (NMT), which has opened new markets and created greater opportunities for localisation with new and existing clients.

Perhaps the biggest element driving how tech continues to shape the localisation industry is the growth in multimedia localisation, primarily fuelled by the migration of online assets.

Here are the key points of growth in tech that are driving the localisation industry.

Digitisation

Storing content on paper just isn’t cutting it anymore. More businesses are flocking towards digitisation as it allows them to make content available to their consumer base irrespective of language or location.

How an organisation manages its document and information is fundamentally important to the success of that business. If a business operates internationally, it needs to prioritise localising training materials, marketing and sales content, as well as other materials to take advantage of cross-cultural learnings and practices.

This is particularly important with the rise of virtual/remote teams. Technology is a major enabler of the rise of virtual teams, especially through cloud-based technology. With more collaboration between offices and through time zones, training, development and communication materials needs to be localised for their respective markets.

Streaming content

Right now, we’re in what many have called, ‘the Second Golden Age of TV,’ which is helped in part by the growth in online streaming. 6 out of 10 UK consumers use BBC iPlayer, Netflix or Amazon Prime. This growth is leading to challenges of scaling and is opening the space to new providers.

As more content becomes streamable, so does the demand to take them into new markets. Netflix and Amazon Prime are releasing shows on a global scale, which means there is a greater demand for dubbed and subtitled content.

Video games

By 2025, the video games industry could become worth USD 300 billion, its growth largely spurned by the rise of mobile and cloud gaming. As the video game market continues to grow, the amount of game content that needs localisation and adapting to new target countries has also increased.

Language service providers need to be ready to capitalise on this demand. However, language service providers also need to be aware of the many elements to consider before localising a video game.

Why other language service providers are not keeping up

Despite these growths in the tech industry, we do not believe that many language service providers are up to task to take advantage of these areas.

According to the ATC survey, over half of respondents (55 per cent) said that their business’ primary focus was on translation. While that might be adequate for multimedia text, such as descriptions and menus, focusing only on translation does not encompass the specific user experience.

For example, for video games to be properly localised, they must internationalise their code and have an architecture and UI that is capable of processing all the target languages.  The user experience must be prioritised, in order to reproduce the experience of the original game in target languages and for their audiences.

A more bespoke localisation process will not only account for the linguistic aspects of the product but will be able to encompass the technical and cultural facets too. For instance, when conveying a film’s story to an international market, attention must be paid to how localisation can make the content culturally relevant to a demographic.

Locaria specialises in services that can help you strengthen your understanding of new markets, convey your brand messaging to international customers and build a global profile.

Find out more

To find out more about how functions like multimedia translation and web content localisation can increase your chances of success in Asia, give us a call on +44 (0)20 3948 6800.