Digital Transformation. The catchphrase used by many. It tries to describe a trend towards automation, granular data exchange, industrial Internet of things, cloud computing, cognitive computing, and artificial intelligence. What does this mean for the translation industry?

We suspect that it means that we will become deeper integrated into our client's business. We will have a more granular connection to ever more minor constituents of our client's production processes, be more casually integrated into our client's teams, be expected to use cognitive computing tools deployed by our clients, and bring our own. All this, of course, is bundled with the demand for ever-higher throughput without sacrificing quality.

For this deep integration to work, our tools must be deeply entangled with our client's productive and creative tools, immediately reacting to changes and updates. APIs will push various data streams from multiple teams. This data can consist of text layers, repositories, scripts, subtitles, a.s.o. This data, displayed out of context, would often be impossible to translate correctly. 

In total, and thanks to the 'digital transformation', it will become common to receive translation data from half-a-dozen sources that will finally be displayed simultaneously to the user. As a result, there must be a place that logically groups and combines this content, displaying all data enriched and in context. There has to be a translation management system more than ever. Not only for human translators but for future in-context MT especially.