Demand of Nepali Translation Today

Due to the impact of globalization and the advent of internet and mass communication, the world has become a global village. Something produced in a place can easily travel around the globe either electronically or through shipping, be it ideas, goods or technology.

As a result, global market and business is booming. In this scenario, where the whole world is connected through internet, roadways and airways, the demand of translation has dramatically increased.

If you want to expand your business or market in foreign countries, you need to localize in the language of the target customers in order to build rapport with them. The global language industry was estimated to be $43 billion in 2017 and expected to reach $47.5 billion by 2021. Today, demand of translation is globally increasing.

With the population of 29.3 million (2017), Nepal is becoming a target of many multinational and foreign companies to sell their products and services. 9% of internet users in 2011 has dramatically increased to 78% as of 2019. Tech giants like Google, Facebook are already available in Nepali language whereas many new websites and applications are including Nepali language in their interface.

Multinational companies are disseminating the information of their products to Nepali costumers in localized language. Similarly, books and publications are also publishing their contents in Nepali language.

Hundreds of NGOs and INGOs working in Nepal find it important to publish their reports, newsletters and documents in both the Nepali and English language.

Films and TV Shows today, are of global nature and require subtitles in local languages to reach more viewers. All of these activities are inviting translation and localization in large scale.

Translation has become mandatory for organizations and companies to extend their businesses and muster trust from the costumers.

The increment in demand of translation in Nepali language is calling for a large number of manpower.

Not only for the English-Nepali translation, but also for the Nepali translation of other languages around the world like Chinese, Hindi, German, Spanish etc.

Despite such demands, we do not have professional and qualified translators in adequate numbers to fulfill the demands. Translation studies in institutions and academia is not in practice in Nepal as it ought to be.

Most of the translators work as freelancer and their skills and competency grow as they go on working.

The few numbers of translators who are professionally involved in translation get loads of work and are not always able to fulfill the demands. Amid such scenario, we need more professional translators with better skills for quality translation.

One might think that there are varieties of Machine Translation platforms like Google, Bing and DeepL translation and there is no need to bother for manual translation.

Machine translation in some languages like Spanish, French are not considered very bad but these programs themselves do not understand the languages and work on certain algorithms.

So, when unfamiliar idioms and phrases arise, they provide the literal dictionary meaning which doesn’t make any sense.

In case of Nepali translation, the result is much more frustrating as it is still in the beginning phase. The advent of such machine translations thus, is not a challenge to the human translators, but a booster.

In future, if we are able to develop more accurate version of machine translation, the imperfect machine translation in collaboration with human translators will save time, add accuracy and give better result, adding more scope to the translation industry.

To wrap up, with the growing internet users and expansion of global market in Nepal, it has become very important for companies and organizations to publish a Nepali version of the document and information they convey to the public and in their own organization.

Entertainment industries through localized subtitles, software platforms through Nepali version of user interface and literary/non-literary books for Nepali readers are calling for translation services in large quantity.

All these factors have constituted for a high demand of translation in localized Nepalese language.