The ATA Chronicle - November/December 2022 - 14

ATA STRATEGY COMMITTEE UPDATE
ATA will work
increasingly on
broadening its
appeal to attract
and retain
new members
by making
them feel the
Association is
a place every
T&I professional
can call home,
regardless of
where they are
in their career.
AI and related services,
meaning that even when
new technologies are being
adopted, they have tended
to include T&I professionals
in the process.
y The startup ecosystem for
language services-related
businesses continues to
thrive, even as funding for
other types of companies
has been drying up.
A few corporate trends
mentioned included the fact
that mergers and acquisitions
have been slowing down,
with funding becoming more
selective. Recent investments
in 2022 have focused on MT,
auto-dubbing, health care
interpreting, translation
" earpieces, " and " techenabled "
translation.
Moving outside of pure
translation and interpreting,
another trend having an
impact on language services
at large is disruptive natural
language processing (NLP).
Large language models are
now being trained on larger
scales, with big tech funding
this development. Some
of the ways in which this
disruptive NLP is being used
include summarization/
paraphrasing, classification,
and semantic similarity
(e.g., Has this question been
answered before?).
Looking ahead, growth
in 2022-2023 in the
language services market
is expected to come from
interpreting (video remote
interpreting/remote
simultaneous interpreting),
content creation,
language access services,
transcreation, language
technology, synthetic
dubbing, and custom textto-speech
applications.
14 The ATA Chronicle | November/December 2022
In September, Slator
hosted another virtual
event, which kicked off
with the latest news about
our industry. Language
services companies (LSC)
have seen their stock
market valuations drop
considerably, pretty much
in line with the rest of the
market, although in some
cases our industry has done
better than average. As
mentioned earlier, there
continues to be a slowdown
in mergers and acquisitions,
with many potential buyers
taking a wait-and-see
approach. However,
deal-making activity
seems to be continuing
behind the scenes.
There haven't been
any mega deals this year,
although plenty of moves
have been made involving
gaming, media, and
interpreting businesses,
with some LSCs buying
NOTES
1
2
" language-adjacent "
technology. As noted at
the June event, growth is
forecast to be slower, with
Slator's conservative estimate
through 2026 at around 2%
to 4% year-on-year.
On the jobs front, the labor
market in language services
recovered considerably
in 2021, a trend that has
continued in 2022. Normally,
there tends to be a decline in
job offers at the end of the
year, but Slator tracked a
small decline (in September).
Going Forward
Shifting gears back to ATA
internally, the Strategy
Committee recently met
during ATA's Annual
Conference in Los Angeles to
discuss its plans for 2023, in
addition to other initiatives.
We'll be sharing our progress
with the Board and members
in the months to come.
A page dedicated to ATA's Strategy Committee is on
ATA's website.
M chura, Michal. " What You Need to Know about Bias in
Machine Translation, " Slator (May 27, 2022).
3
Proceedings for the main conference and workshops of
the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas,
Orlando 2022.
4
SlatorCon Remote September 2022 and SlatorCon Remote
June 2022.
John Milan, CT is the treasurer of ATA and
chair of both ATA's Finance and Audit Committee
and the Strategy Committee. He is ATA certified
in Portuguese>English, and an economist, writer,
and lecturer on the business and economics of
language services. For 10 years, he worked in São Paulo,
Brazil as an adjunct professor of economics. He has an MS
in applied microeconomics from Ohio State University and
degrees in international political economy and Spanish from
Indiana University. john@milanlanguageservices.com
www.atanet.org

https://www.atanet.org/committee/strategy-committee/ https://www.atanet.org/committee/strategy-committee/ https://slator.com/what-you-need-to-know-about-bias-in-machine-translation/?utm_source=Slator+Newsletter&utm_campaign=37105f5674-Slator+Weekly+-+Dec+11%2C+2020_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_28e0ad4ca5-37105f5674-165507107&mc_cid=37105f5674&mc_eid=dfdcf1e48a https://slator.com/what-you-need-to-know-about-bias-in-machine-translation/?utm_source=Slator+Newsletter&utm_campaign=37105f5674-Slator+Weekly+-+Dec+11%2C+2020_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_28e0ad4ca5-37105f5674-165507107&mc_cid=37105f5674&mc_eid=dfdcf1e48a https://amtaweb.org/amta-2022-proceedings-for-the-main-conference-and-workshops/ https://amtaweb.org/amta-2022-proceedings-for-the-main-conference-and-workshops/ https://amtaweb.org/amta-2022-proceedings-for-the-main-conference-and-workshops/ https://slator.com/event/slatorcon-remote-september-2022/ https://slator.com/slatorcon-remote-june-2022-agenda/ https://slator.com/slatorcon-remote-june-2022-agenda/ http://www.atanet.org

The ATA Chronicle - November/December 2022

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