One month ago, I was a product engineer in the marketing department of an air conditioning company. Now I have changed my career to translation industry. Before I joined the translation industry, like many outsiders, I had many misconceptions of translation industry.

For example, I once thought anyone worked in the translation company could be a translator. But the truth is No. Quality translators are hard to come by, and once you’ve found one, you need to hold on to him or her.

Translation is a great skill and takes great finesse andpractice! The ability to understand a document and convey the same information in a different language is one that cannot be easily dismissed.

Another misconception people usually hold is to think that all translators can deliver quality translations in every subject area. The truth is the odds are slim that someone has the desire and experience to translate in all fields, such as documents for translation in aerospace industry, medication industry and mechanical industry.

We always strive to assign any given translation to someone who is an expert in that particular field. Not only will they have the vocabulary to make the final files as good as the original, but they will be much more likely to understand the original document and keep its meaning through the translation.

There are also many people think that translation industry will be declining soon because machine translation will take the place of human translation with the efforts of IT developers.

But no one could deny that the translation and localization industry has been defying economic trends for quite some time now. While the world’s economy insists on slowing down, the language industry continues its steep ascent with a expected growth more than 10% in 2013.

Machine translation might replace some of the very basic communication needs that result from a number of intercultural and interlinguistic exchanges like the handy Google translation or Bing translation. But machine translation will always struggle to deliver high quality and creative translation which only professional human translators could do.

Here we can pick a simple example. You could never count on a machine translation to translate a technical document about mechanical like a translator who have years of working experience in mechanical industry.

Neither could you let machine translation taking place a translator who has worked as a lawyer for more than 10 years on translating professional legal documents. So we could conclude that rather than replacing human translation, machine translation will push the human translation to the higher end of the market.

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