Current and Prospective Effects of (N)MT and Post-Editing on Turkey’s Translation Industry

Turkey’s translation industry is still at an early stage of development and is riddled with many problems. Like anywhere else in the world, the demand for translation in Turkey has dramatically increased in the 1990s as a result of globalization and internationalization. That was when the first market-oriented translation and localization companies had emerged.

The near future of the translation industry in Turkey will, of course, be affected by the recent advancement of machine translation technology. Interestingly, Turkish was among the nine languages Google Inc. had chosen for their NMT experiment. This shows that large corporations like Google Inc. consider Turkey an attractive market for investments into language services.

On the other hand, since the Turkish translation market is currently unregulated and unimproved in its nature, the future developments in NMT will put many translation companies and individual translators at risk. Well-organized, trend-savvy, highly qualified companies and linguists will probably survive, though.

In this presentation, I will try to give a brief history of Turkey’s translation industry and how (N)MT will affect such an unimproved, unregulated industry.