Market research and consulting firm Nimdzi Insights released an updated report organizing hundreds of language technology solutions into one atlas. The sections of the atlas and the report map out some of the recent changes in the language technology arena. 

The language tech atlas, officially called “The Nimdzi Language Technology Atlas,” groups technologies into sections: Translation Business Management Systems (BMS), Translation Management Systems (TMS), Integrators (Middleware), Quality Management, including Terminology Management Systems, Machine Translation (MT), Virtual Interpreting Technology (VIT), Speech Recognition Solutions, Audiovisual Translation Tools (AVT), Marketplaces and Platforms. 

To compile the data, the research firm gathered responses from an annual survey aimed at collecting new additions to the Atlas and updating changes to tools from the previous year. Nimdzi also held over 50 briefings and meetings with language technology firms in the first half of the year. Additionally, researchers analyzed publicly available data and leveraged the experience of the team’s language technology experts, who regularly use and evaluate language solutions across the market.

Compared to last year’s report, which listed 660 individually-mapped products, this year’s research initiative studied 800 tools. The resulting main infographic did not feature smaller technology groupings such as TMX editors, term banks, and internationalization tools. However, two new subsections – remote recording and AI-enhanced dubbing tools, were added to the growing audiovisual translation section.

This year, Nimdzi named Zoom as the de facto largest remote simultaneous interpreting (RSI) provider. The report comments on the decision: 

“While this might be controversial for some in the language industry, we added Zoom to the RSI category in this year’s Language Technology Atlas for the very first time, as we believe the video conferencing giant has earned its place. Although Zoom’s main focus is not on multilingual meetings, the platform has added an RSI feature and, most importantly, has become the de facto largest RSI platform judging by the number of meetings” (Nimdzi Language Technology Atlas, 2021).

Ever since March 2020, Zoom’s market valuation has more than tripled, according to the report, and the number of daily meeting participants increased from 10 million (December 2019) to more than 300 million. Nimdzi concludes that this data propels Zoom ahead of competitors, “even though the number of daily meeting participants has increased by 70 percent, on average, for all major video conferencing platforms since COVID-19 (the next closest is Microsoft Teams with 115 million active users per day).”

The report and the Atlas are freely available on Nimdzi’s website.

About Nimdzi Insights: 

Nimdzi Insights is an international market research and consulting company. Nimdzi advises on international trade & development, language services, localization programs, business operations, and mergers and acquisitions. Nimdzi is committed to providing opportunities for continuous professional development and resources for business professionals worldwide.