Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Escaping False Polarizations in the AI how the Language Industry Can Talk More Honestly about AI by Domenico Lombardini Umberto ico, the famous Italian semiotician and novelist, published a book in 1964 titled Apokolitici e integrati, the English translation of which is Apocalypse Postponed, though the literal meaning is closer to apocalyptic and integrated intellectuals.
[00:00:28] In it, he categorizes people's attitudes towards the mass culture and media of the time into the apocalyptic, those who express a critical and aristocratic attitude, and the integrated those who have a naively optimistic view of it. Nowadays, the same categories could be used to describe viewpoints about artificial intelligence in the language sector. The apocalyptic adopts almost millenarian attitudes towards AIs, aiming to, say, help every man for himself. The integrated, on the other hand, indulges in excessive optimism about the technology's ability to lower costs while simultaneously keeping clients, language service providers, LSPs, and freelance linguists happy. But, as we say in Italian, FA pina e mogli ubriaca, roughly analogous to the English idiom, you can't have your cake and eat it too. How do we escape these false polarizations that prevent us from analyzing the reality of AI? We need to adopt a less ideological mindset and move toward a more empirical approach based on data and facts. We shouldn't use excessive pessimism to discourage newcomers too much. Nor should we use excessive optimism to promote ourselves and feed the echo chambers of industry associations and perhaps even of this magazine. So, leaving ideology and extremes behind, what is the real effect of AI on the language industry and how will it evolve in the future? Let's examine relevant historical patterns and the latest industry data to find answers.
[00:02:05] Creative Destruction Joseph alois Schumpeter, the 20th century Austrian economist, coined the notion of creative destruction to explain technological and economic development.
[00:02:17] This process, which has become increasingly evident since the first industrial Revolution, is a dynamic and relentless feature of capitalist economies in which new innovations destroy old economic structures and replace them with more efficient ones. In the short term, this destruction causes economic pain, but in the medium and long term it creates systems that are able to offer higher wages.
[00:02:42] That's the entire foundation of economic growth in all industrialized countries. The interim period that includes the destruction phase is painful but nonetheless necessary so that less efficient companies can be replaced by more efficient ones. The question that arises is what degree of destruction, in qualitative and quantitative terms, is AI already imposing on our industry? Is this process entirely similar to Schumpeterie and creative destruction? Or is there something unprecedented happening related to the particular nature of AI?
[00:03:16] Will the destructive phase be followed by an actual creative phase capable of improving people's wage conditions? In other words, is AI an innovative technology like any other, or is it something radically different never seen in recent history? Are we going through a normal process, or are we in the midst of a paradigm shift imposed by the exceptionalism of this new technology?
[00:03:39] The trouble is that being in the middle of this transformation, we can't easily understand much of what's really happening. However, we can analyze trends in the language services sector and try to draw inferences about AI's role. We can ask, is AI already having measurable impacts on language industry trends, and what are these impacts, if any?
[00:04:01] A Look at the Data let's start with the facts. In 2024, the global language services market reached USD $71.7 billion, up 5.6% year over year. For the first time, two companies exceeded a billion dollars in revenue. Just below them, other players sit in the $800 minus $900 million range. Yet the industry's structure remains highly fragmented, with the top 100 companies covering only approximately 19.7% of the total market value and the top 10 just 9.6%.
[00:04:39] Meanwhile, 85% of the market is still in the hands of small and medium sized enterprises. SMEs. The point isn't just how much the market is growing, it's how it's growing. A significant portion of recent momentum is inorganic. The 2024-2025 period saw an acceleration of consolidation from keywords privatization, a multibillion dollar deal, to Propio's leapfrog growth through acquisitions of ulg, Acorby and ASL Services. Where like for like data can be isolated, growth appears more modest. Rws, for example, reported essentially flat revenue on a constant perimeter basis and a slight decline in reported figures. In other words, the aggregate pie is expanding partly because many pieces of the pie are being consolidated under the same brands.
[00:05:32] Here we return to the question of AI's effect. The quantitative signals are already there. In Europe, 78% of LSPs say they plan to increase their use of machine translation. Post editing, we're seeing cost reductions of 30 to 50% and editing time cuts of up to 63%. With large language model LLM supported workflows, RWS attributes more than 25% of its revenue to AI enabled products and services.
[00:06:04] Transperfect has explicitly stated that automation savings have cooled growth in traditional services because they've been passed on to clients. In other words, AI is compressing unit margins and shifting the revenue 1009. Mergers and acquisitions, meanwhile, support aggregate revenue volume and recalibrate market shares.
[00:06:27] In sum, the data tell us global demand for multilingual content is growing faster than AI's capacity to crush its costs. The market isn't retreating, AI isn't eliminating work, but rather recomposing it. Less pure human translation, more mtpe, more orchestration of processes, quality and data governance, and more integration into client workflows. The visible growth is partly accounting driven acquisitions, while organic growth volumes prices at constant perimeter is more subtle and depends on the ability to offer value beyond the word, such as service level agreements, SLAs, security compliance, integrations and data. In short, the AI effect on the language sector is already measurable. Lower price per word, higher productivity, more polarization between those who truly integrate data automation or regulated verticals and those stuck with the piecework model. It's not the end of the market.
[00:07:35] It's a structural reorganization in which innovation lowers unit margins but raises the competitive bar and shifts value creation upstream and downstream. From the translated sentence, these data demonstrate how AI is already imposing a fundamental shift on the sector, with the real variable being not whether AI will destroy language work, but who will occupy the new links in the chain data and model readiness, quality, operations security and compliance, and application integration. Everything else is inertia, the fatal comfort zone that blinds us even as new scenarios unfold before our eyes.
[00:08:14] It's time to take the red pill.
[00:08:16] You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. So says Morpheus Teneo in the movie the Matrix. And so I say to you colleagues and friends in the language industry, the red pill is the recognition of the radical and irreversible change happening in our sector, of which we are experiencing only the early signs. Today we may be in the early Schumpeterian destructive phase and don't know what form the sector will take once things mature despite the unknowns. The worst thing we can do is fail to objectively analyze the reality in front of us, not only aggregate data, but also what we see in our own companies. Machine translation is now used in almost every scenario and automatic post editing tools based on LLMs are spreading, promising to produce post edited texts of quality that is nearly on par with what a human can guarantee, or at least texts that can be edited by a human in less time, denying this reality and spreading excessively pessimistic visions, or conversely, indulging in excessive Optimism doesn't help anyone, so let's not tell ourselves stories. No, it's not true that there will be room for everyone. No, it's not true that we don't have or won't have an excess of freelance linguists in many sectors. AI already has the effect of favoring the highly skilled and disadvantaging low skilled or entry level profiles. But by definition, the highly skilled are in a Gaussian distribution of competencies very few, and those few will have productivity sufficient to replace several low skilled or entry level people who represent a good portion of all potential workers.
[00:10:06] Many say that language work will be replaced by consulting work from professionals like workflow Automation consultants. That is certainly the case, but the number of those professionals will be far fewer than the current number of workers in the language sector. If we think about it, this is exactly what Schumpeter said. With new, more efficient technologies, the higher productivity worker will earn more and those expelled from the sector will have to change jobs. Is all this really such a bad thing? No, it's not. What's bad is continuing to take the blue pill and saying that things won't change and that there will be room for everyone. The only way to help people, especially young people in training, is to tell them the truth. Only then can they make informed decisions about their professional future. The urgent need for reskilling Would you recommend that a young person enter the language sector? This question comes to me from parents who know I've been working in this industry for years and who have children pursuing academic training in linguistics. I often don't want to discourage them. After all, they're spending a lot of money to educate their children.
[00:11:15] So I give them a non committal answer. I hedge and equivocate. I'm evasive and I use circumlocutions and euphemisms. In short, I'm essentially feeding them blue pills by the handful. The truth is that no, under current conditions, market and training, I would not recommend a young person enter the language sector. But that doesn't mean we can't do anything at all to change these conditions.
[00:11:40] On the market side, there's not much we can do. Despite the many propagandists out there promoting a unionist vision of language work, it's evident that such an approach is ineffective.
[00:11:51] Beyond attracting attention and generating self promotion. Though I believe clients will avoid these people, such efforts in a deregulated globalized market will inevitably fail. It's on the training conditions that we must act to improve the future of new entrants Academic linguistic training is outdated and for the most part, useless for young people.
[00:12:14] Not only is it too theoretical, but even the practical part hasn't been updated to market demand from five or 10 years ago.
[00:12:22] We're training tens of thousands of young people who, if they become linguists, will be exposed to a competitive landscape dominated exclusively by cost competition. Do we want this for our young people?
[00:12:34] I don't think so. What should we do then? On the training side, we should create study programs on how to do business in the language sector. Considering the current and future competitive landscape, we should teach which tools and technologies to use, which sectors to specialize in, which workflows to adopt, how to manage employees and collaborators, how to find clients, how to read a company's balance sheet, how to plan and pay taxes, and how to integrate other services alongside translation and localization.
[00:13:07] The naming of degree programs should reflect these changes. For example, one could be called Entrepreneurship in Multilingual Content Creation and Translation. Young people who graduate from training programs like this would be better equipped to thrive in a highly competitive and rapidly transforming sector. If this were the training available today, then yes, I would recommend a young person enter the language sector.
[00:13:33] Conclusion Today, adherence to polarized and polarizing visions is a very common temptation, but one we must guard against.
[00:13:43] We owe it to ourselves and to language industry newcomers to evaluate AI's impact as objectively as possible and to be honest about the trade offs the technology brings. The worst thing we can do is remain in our increasingly shaky comfort zone, which will soon become a dead zone. The best thing we can do is revamp our linguistic training programs to equip young people with the tools to compete on value, not price.
[00:14:08] The red pill doesn't mean saying run away, it means saying prepare differently. This article was written by Domenico Lombardini. He is the founder and CEO of ASTW Specialized Translation, a boutique translation provider and content creator operating in the fields of legal, technical, medical and scientific communication. He is a lecturer at Cafoscari University of Venice. Originally published in multilingual media, issue 247, January 2026.
